case study - bpo accounting

International engineering business (£300m sales)

At the beginning of this assignment, the business had 5 separate finance teams in UK across 4 locations. None of its processes were measured or benchmarked but it was clear that the function was overmanned.

KPI's were developed to focus management's attention on the volumes of transactions being processed and on the unit cost of processing at each location. This highlighted processes and locations requiring improvement. This analysis led to the consolidation of all transaction processing activities into one team and the deployment of qualified finance staff to each business unit on a full time basis.

'Lite' internal service agreements were agreed with each business unit and measured improvements in service were achieved at the same time as a 20% reduction in headcount.

Scope of service: all payments and payment processing, sales order and invoice processing, first line credit control, general ledger accounting, VAT and PAYE/NIC compliance, fixed asset and project accounting, purchase order/goods received/purchase invoice matching, production of standard monthly management information packs.