Finance leaders and strategists are at the helm of managing the cash flow, revenue streams, and expenses of the organization. With such responsibilities at their shoulders, it is important for them manage their goals and activities effectively to achieve organizational objectives.
Enter, Finance OKRs, a methodology to help finance leaders operationalize and streamline their tasks to focus on key areas and harbinger results.
Finance OKRs have become an important part of performance management in today’s changing business environment. Many thoughtful leaders are adopting them to accomplish their organizations’ most important financial goals. The Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) methodology is one of the most simple and effective ways for goal setting and monitoring.
In this article, we will discuss Finance OKRs and provide pragmatic examples that you can use in your organization.
Also Read: Marketing OKRs examples
Finance OKRs Examples
Writing OKRs for the finance department can be a daunting task, especially when you are doing it for the first time. You must be aware of the critical areas that require your attention, as well as what you must track and monitor. Well-written OKRs can help increase the productivity of the team by aligning team members’ objectives with the organization’s goals. And it requires several improvement cycles to come up with the winning OKRs.
You can refer to the below guide to understand the process of writing effective and successful business OKRs and recreate them for your finance team.
Also Read: The Essential Guide To OKRs: Your Ultimate Tool To Setting Winning Goals
Objective 1 – Strengthen and make the auditing process transparent
Key results –
- Complete an internal audit before the end of Q3
- Audit 60% of the identified risks
- Prepare a monthly report to avoid loss of data
- Identify departments and process where repeated losses occur
Objective 2- Get budget variance to less than 5% (budget to actual)
Key results –
- Identify loss areas and reduce unnecessary expenditure by 80% by Q4 2017-18
- List all categories that have used excess of budget more than 3 times in last 6 months
- Identify the categories where repeated losses occur
Objective 3- Improve annual budgeting and business planning
Key results –
- Increase Average Monthly Revenue Growth Rate to 20%
- Reduce costs for the budget meeting by 50 percent
- Close the final budget by November 30th
- Have each business line manager start using our online dashboards
Objective 4- Create annual financial strategy
Key results –
- Finalize budget by Q4 FY 2020-2021
- Active discussions all the team function managers by Q4 FY 2020-2021
Objective 5- Make quarterly financial analysis processes more efficient
Key results-
- Create a strategic plan for optimizing the 5 most important processes
- Organize 3 webinars per month discussing the importance of internal reporting
- Create customizable internal templates for quick reporting
Objective 6- Make financial reporting more transparent
Key results-
- Payment processing time to be reduced from 22 hours to 18 hours
- Automate categorizing every invoice based on the type of expense
- Primary documentation to be reduced from 80% to 50%
Also read: Goal Setting Processes – OKR vs KPI
Objective 7- Reducing payroll errors
Key results-
- Create a 3 step verification process including maker, checker, and verifier
- Reduce payroll errors to vendors and consultants by 30%
- Reduce error resolution time from 48 hours to 36 hours
Final Thoughts On Finance OKRs
Goal setting is critically important to reaching organizational objectives. With the help of methodologies like OKRs, organizations can create and analyze the progress of their most important goals. The finance team OKRs discussed in this article will help your team gain greater visibility into their goals, making them more accountable for their performance.
