Finance Transformation
How to Fix a Finance Function You Have Just Inherited
1 December 2025
Starting a new finance leadership role and inheriting a function that is not working is more common than job descriptions suggest. The handover presents a tidy picture. The first few weeks reveal a different one: processes that are undocumented, systems that do not talk to each other, reconciliations that have not been done in months, and a team that has been managing rather than improving for as long as anyone can remember.
The instinct is to fix everything immediately. That instinct is wrong. Moving too fast in a new finance role, particularly one where the function has problems, is how you break things that were working and create new problems while trying to solve the old ones.
The first ninety days have a specific job. It is not transformation. It is diagnosis.
The first thirty days: understand before you change
The single most valuable thing you can do in the first thirty days is listen and observe, without fixing anything that does not require immediate intervention.
Talk to every member of the finance team. Not a formal review, a conversation. What do they spend most of their time on? What do they find most frustrating? What do they wish worked differently? What do they think management does not understand about the finance function? These conversations surface problems that no process review will find, and they build a relationship with the team that you will need when change comes.
Talk to the people in the business who use finance outputs. The MD, the operations director, the sales team, whoever has the most interaction with the finance function. What do they actually need? What are they not getting? Where has finance let them down? Where have they gone elsewhere for information because finance could not provide it?
Review the last twelve months of management accounts, board packs, and any audit or external review findings. The pattern of adjustments, late deliveries, and audit queries tells you a great deal about where the real problems are.
The first sixty days: prioritise ruthlessly
By the end of sixty days you should have a clear picture of the function’s strengths and weaknesses. Not every weakness can or should be addressed immediately. Prioritise based on risk and impact.
What is creating the most risk to the business right now? Unreliable balance sheet reconciliations, late statutory filings, missing controls around payments: these need to be addressed before anything else. They are the problems that can become crises.
What is creating the most friction for the business? Late management accounts, unreliable forecasts, inability to answer basic questions quickly: these are the credibility problems. These are the hallmarks of finance functions that have lost trust. Fixing them improves the finance function’s relationship with the business and creates the goodwill needed for the harder changes that follow.
What is the quick win that the team will see and believe in? Finance teams that have been in a dysfunctional function for a long time are often sceptical that things will actually change. A visible improvement in the first sixty days, ideally something the team themselves identified, builds the belief that change is real.
The first ninety days: build the plan
By ninety days you should be able to articulate clearly what the function needs to look like in twelve months and what the path to get there is. Not a vague aspiration, a specific plan with priorities, owners, timelines, and metrics. In some cases you are effectively building a finance function from scratch inside an existing organisation.
The plan should be built with the team, not handed down to them. The people who run the processes every day know better than anyone what is wrong and often have ideas about how to fix it. A plan built with their input is more likely to be right and significantly more likely to be implemented. Good change management starts with this kind of inclusion.
Present the plan to the MD or CEO with your assessment of the current state, your recommended priorities, and what you need in terms of resource and support to deliver it. This conversation, done well, is what shifts the finance function from a cost centre the business tolerates to an investment the business understands. If you need finance transformation advisory support for this kind of work, that is what I do.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) and finance transformation specialist with direct experience inheriting and rebuilding finance functions in commercial and operational environments.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), Big 4 trained, with twenty years of experience building and running international businesses. She specialises in finance transformation, ecommerce operations, and digital strategy.