Does your finance department have trouble in paradise? Maybe, if your financial reports are always delayed, people don’t trust your financial information, or there are archaic and manual processes weighing down your team.

These are all common symptoms of dysfunction in an association’s finance department. While they may seem like minor issues, they are often symptoms of deeper challenges related to some combination of your team, processes, and systems.

Most critical to determining the real challenges and figuring out how to fix them is an assessment. By taking an unbiased look at how work is done today, association finance teams can ask why things are the way they are and identify where there are breakdowns. There are many ways to do an assessment:

Process mapping. Get the finance team in a room and pick a manual process that is burdening them. Chart or map out the steps in the process and look for areas of duplication, inefficiency, or bottlenecks.

Interviews. Sit down with each member of the finance and accounting teams and ask them to describe their roles. Have them walk through how they do the work, where they run into challenges, and where they have ideas for improvement or automation.

System walk-through. While conducting interviews, ask people to pull up the systems they use and show you where things work well, and where they use workarounds to get things done.

Stakeholder feedback. Gather feedback via one-on-one interviews or focus group discussions with customers or partners of the finance team. Seek to understand how these people interact with finance and accounting, what information they get, and how they would like to partner in the future.

Some organizations take this on solo; others choose to bring in a third party to help assess the situation and build the game plan, also known as a maturity model.

Designing a Maturity Model

It can be easy to point out what’s wrong, but it’s harder to decide where to go next and how to get there. This is where a maturity model can be helpful. Paired with an assessment of your finance team and functions, it is a powerful way to set goals, figure out a strategy, and get the whole team on board.

The example below depicts the different stages of maturity for the planning and budgeting function. As an organization matures, it will likely need more mature processes for planning and budgeting.

Core Areas	Start-up	Formative	Growth	Maturity
Planning and Budgeting	High-level budget created by finance annually.	Annual budget is the only financial planning tool. Process includes limited financial leaders.	Budget process engages all leadership. Projections created on an ongoing basis.	Multiyear planning process and tools are created and used in decision making. Budgets are accurate and useful.

Common “core areas” for your maturity model may include:

• planning and budgeting
• reporting and analysis
• month-end close
• revenues and accounts receivable
• expenses and accounts payable
• team structure and roles
• systems and integration

After you define the various stages of finance for your organization, you can use a road map to plot where you are today, where you would like to be, and how to get there.

Building a Road Map

Once you have assessed your current state and identified your future, or mature state, all that is left is to figure out how to get from point A to point B. While you may be sick of charts, I find using a Gantt chart format is a great way to visually depict what will happen and in what sequence. 

This can help you develop a plan that is realistic, doesn’t assume too much change, and keeps everyone grounded in what they should prioritize at each point in the year. Here's an example:

So often, association finance departments are the last to change or evolve even though the association is constantly growing at seemingly lightning speed. If your organization is facing any of the symptoms noted above, an assessment, maturity model, and road-map approach might be one way to help fix any dysfunction and better position you to support your association.