How interdepartmental connections benefit finance

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Ever feel like your accountants are forever tucked away in the farthest corner of the office’s cubicle farm, where all the “spreadsheet nerds” belong?

There are ways to break down those walls (we’re speaking metaphorically, now) that divide accounting and the rest of an organization. CFO Brew spoke with two finance leaders who have made it their business to remove barriers between finance and the rest of the company.

The benefits, they said, are symbiotic. The finance folks better understand where they fit into the organization as a whole, and other teams can see how they’re impacting the company’s finances.

“[Other departments] know how their decision-making is going to affect the company’s financial health, and that’s a really powerful type of partner to have when you’re a finance operator, connecting with other stakeholders,” Michael Zheng, SVP of finance and people at Spinwheel, a consumer credit data platform, told us.

Same team. With a wealth of data and tools at its disposal, the finance function can be a key contributor to other functions—especially marketing, sales, and customer success, according to Zheng.

“If we’re trying to achieve goal A or metric Z,” Zheng explained, finance is “able to say, ‘Hey, let’s break it down. What are the things that need to be true from each department or each key role, what does that look like in terms of process, data, decision-making?’ And let’s have a good discussion that’s data-driven with each of those stakeholders to make sure that that part of the funnel, or that part of the initiative, is optimized and ultimately you’re driving the right outcomes.”

Zheng said he works with Spinwheel’s engineering team, breaking down product roadmaps into “sprints, big milestones” to figure out how many people and resources (think: AI tokens) they need.

“Going back to that, you know, functional business partner, you [the CFO] need to know enough to engage that respected leader,” he said.

Gathering space. Robert Hoffman, CFO of biotech company CytoDyn, told CFO Brew he brings in guests from other functions to speak with the accounting group. That reinforces the why behind what the accounting team is doing for CytoDyn, he said.

A leader from CytoDyn’s clinical development side spoke with Hoffman’s team recently to talk about the uses and effectiveness of a specific CytoDyn drug. In another session, a CytoDyn lawyer spoke with accounting about how the company protects its intellectual property.

“I think it makes our group better,” Hoffman explained, “and it makes them understand that we’re in it to help them, and ultimately help patients, because that’s why we’re all in it.”

Hoffman said he brings in a speaker about once a month. After six months of doing this, Hoffman said that other departments began asking him why they hadn’t gotten the chance yet to present to the accounting team.

“I believe that makes my accounting group much better,” Hoffman said.