Finance Transformation
What a Finance Director Actually Does (And What They Should Stop Doing)
1 March 2025
The Finance Director title covers an enormous range of actual jobs. In one organisation it means running a ten-person finance function, presenting to the board, and sitting on the executive committee. In another it means doing the bookkeeping, managing payroll, and producing a monthly P&L that one person reads. The title is not the job description. Crossing from founder to finance leader sharpens this distinction even further.
What a Finance Director should be doing is equally varied depending on the business. But there are patterns in what effective FDs do, and patterns in what FDs who are not adding full value tend to be doing instead.
What the job actually is
The Finance Director’s job is to give the business better information to make better decisions, faster. That is it. Everything else is in service of that.
The technical work, the statutory accounts, the audit management, the tax compliance, the management reporting, the controls framework: this is the infrastructure. It needs to exist and it needs to be right. But infrastructure is not strategy. A Finance Director who spends the majority of their time on infrastructure is a senior accountant, not a business leader.
The leadership work is different. It is the commercial conversation with the MD or CEO about which bets to make and what they cost. It is the challenge to the sales team’s assumptions in the business plan. It is the early warning when the cash position is tightening before it becomes a crisis. It is the read on whether the acquisition price makes sense. This is where a Finance Director earns the seniority of the title.
What FDs tend to spend too much time on
Producing reports instead of designing systems that produce them. A Finance Director who personally builds the board pack every month is spending senior time on a task that should be systematised. Understanding what good management accounts look like makes it possible to design the pack once and delegate the production. The FD should have designed the reporting architecture once, and the team should run it.
Reviewing work that should not need reviewing. If every journal, every reconciliation, every supplier payment needs the FD to sign off, the controls are wrong. Proper controls mean exceptions are escalated, not everything. The FD reviewing everything is a symptom of insufficient trust in the team or in the processes, both of which are solvable problems.
Being the only person who understands the numbers. A finance function where the FD is the sole interpreter of financial data has a single point of failure. These are the finance functions that lose credibility when that person leaves. Part of the job is building the capability of the team and the financial literacy of the wider business so that the FD is not the bottleneck.
Avoiding difficult conversations. The FD is often the person who has to tell the CEO that the growth plan does not add up, that the margin is not what the sales team thinks it is, or that the business cannot afford what is being proposed. Finance Directors who soften these messages, delay them, or avoid them entirely are failing at one of the most important parts of the job.
The delegation question
Most Finance Directors who are working too far into the detail are doing so because they do not fully trust either their team or their processes. The solution is not to keep doing the work. It is to fix what needs fixing so the work can be safely delegated.
That usually means process documentation, system improvements, team development, and clear role definitions. It takes time upfront. It returns that time compounded over every month that follows.
What to stop doing, specifically
Stop producing reports manually that a system should produce. Stop reviewing work that a well-designed control would catch automatically. Stop attending meetings where the finance function’s presence is informational rather than decision-making. Stop being the person who chases other departments for data that should come to finance automatically as part of a defined process.
The time recovered goes into commercial analysis, strategic input, and business partnership. That is the job. If you need senior finance leadership with this commercial perspective, that is the kind of work I do.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) and finance transformation specialist with Big 4 training and twenty years of operational experience as a founder and senior finance leader.
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.