Qualified
Rob Searle qualified in 1999 as a Chartered Accountant and is a Fellow of the ICAEW.
Experience
Our team has over 100 years collective experience of running and managing finance departments.
Expertise
CFD designs, implements, develops and constantly improves a finance department that is an efficient, value added information epicenter for the business. It’s not just about keeping score or recording of historic events for compliance purposes.
Trust
We have worked with many business owners and become trusted members of their teams. It is this trust and these references that we value above all else.
A typical CFD client:
- SME, often with a high degree of owner management
- 5 to 50 employees
- Limited access to funding and careful working capital management requirements
- Planning to grow and invest in the business
- Basic accounting know-how, which has become insufficient as business has grown
- Need regular, up to date information and support for decision making, but struggling to get it
- Looking to step out of the accounting trenches to focus on moving the business forwards
- Limited knowledge to confidently develop, invest in and utilize modern financial systems
Such a business may already have a small finance team, perhaps made up of bookkeepers and accounts assistants. This small team maybe good at keeping score and basic compliance, but will struggle to go beyond this.
At CFD, we understand that the transfer across to us can be difficult when you have an existing team, who will have valuable business specific experience and your trust.
We see this as an advantage and seek to retain staff. We are then able to utilise this knowledge, whilst delivering the additional CFD benefits.
Fixed monthly cost
For a fixed monthly cost, aligned with a service level agreement, a CFD led finance function provides the following benefits:
- Best practice; we know what great looks like
- Highly skilled, experienced and motivated staff
- Access to economies of scale to help control (and even reduce) overall costs
- Additional resource, available to tap into for one-off project work
- Access to higher skills and expertise, with a deep understanding of your business, when required
- Management of the finance team. Supervision, motivation, holiday cover, training, leavers and HR compliance, and other staff complications become CFD’s responsibility
- We remain up to date with the latest legislative changes so that you can be confident you are as well
Paperless
CFD uses a completely paperless and cloud based document management system which offer significant IT benefits:
- No capital expenditure required for software
- Cloud based applications, meaning access anywhere via the internet
- Best in practice software which will grow with your business
- Paperless document management and authorisation system
- Improved data security and ‘up time’
- No IT network on-costs, planning or concerns
- As Cloud based apps use consistent API’s, there is an ever increasing number plugins and apps being written to effectively create your own ERP system