What are the best practices for keeping up with financial strategy changes?

1 Assess your current situation

Before you can make any changes, you need to have a clear and accurate picture of your current financial performance and position. This means reviewing your financial statements, ratios, budgets, forecasts, and key performance indicators (KPIs). You also need to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) and compare them with your competitors and industry benchmarks. This will help you determine where you stand, what you need to improve, and what you can leverage.

2 Define your objectives and priorities

Once you have assessed your current situation, you need to define your financial objectives and priorities for the short-term and long-term. What are the specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals that you want to achieve? How do they align with your overall business vision and mission? What are the most critical and urgent issues that you need to address? How will you measure and monitor your progress and performance? These questions will help you set clear and realistic expectations and focus your efforts.

4 Implement your changes and communicate them

Once you have evaluated your options and risks, you need to implement your changes and communicate them to your stakeholders. This means creating a detailed action plan that outlines the steps, responsibilities, resources, timelines, and deliverables for each change. You also need to ensure that your changes are aligned with your existing policies, procedures, standards, and systems, or update them accordingly. Moreover, you need to communicate your changes clearly and consistently to your employees, managers, investors, customers, and regulators, and explain the rationale, benefits, and expectations behind them.

5 Review and adjust your changes

Finally, you need to review and adjust your changes as you execute them and monitor their outcomes. This means collecting and analyzing feedback, data, and results from your changes and comparing them with your objectives and KPIs. You also need to identify any gaps, errors, or issues that may arise from your changes and take corrective actions as needed. Furthermore, you need to be flexible and responsive to any new changes or opportunities that may emerge in the external or internal environment and adapt your financial strategy accordingly.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?