Spending Review to Improve Cost Visibility

Our Finance Director helped this not-for-profit monitor is expenditures, with a full spending review and plan of future focused around cost saving technologies.

Company Profile

A leading not-for-profit education company providing specialised education programmes to disadvantaged young people.

CEO’s Mission

This business required a spending review and wished to reduce capital expenditure in order to justify spending to their board alongside making spending more predictable across related operations. The company didn’t wish to employ a full-time CTO. Therefore, the Director was required to implement a new spending programme and evaluate the company’s growth.

What Our Director Did

Goal For Spending Review

The Finance Director sat down with the team to understand and validate the initial goals set for this project. The goal was to find opportunities to consolidate databases and increase efficiency to reduce costs. The Director discussed tactics and goals with stakeholders throughout the project, ensuring the company’s core values remained intact and the project’s original goals would be met. The role also involved considering alternative tactics. Then, the company created a custom ‘scorecard’ to track goals, which included industry benchmarks for the selected products and services.

Project Mapping

By looking at all systems across HR, employee engagement and billing, the Director was able to create a full dependency map to evaluate the company’s outgoings and output. Therefore, a hands-on approach meant the Director could fully understand the way each team worked and create a thorough presentation for stakeholders. This included achievable goals, manageable timescales and a full project plan.

New Technology

The Director identified several new systems as logical and beneficial for the company’s next steps. Consequently, the company shifted communication frameworks to Slack and Trello for more cohesive and effective communication. They also transitioned the existing CRM system to Hubspot, deeming it the most efficient option for the business.

The Results

The Director’s project created more visibility across the business, enabling the management team to be able to illustrate spending and operating costs more clearly to the board and investors. By the end of the spending review and with the ‘scorecard’ in place, all costs were known and forecasted in real-time, which was not only beneficial from a monetary point of view, but also safeguarded against software compliance issues such as data sovereignty, privacy and security requirements in the future. Improvements were also made across the board on security standards, and as a result of this project the company was able to meet certifications and standards that they weren’t able to reach previously. Increased employee and volunteer engagement and much-improved communication were just some of the other positive outcomes of the Director’s hands-on and proactive approach to this project.