Finance Transformation
What value creation actually means for a finance team
14 April 2026
“Value creation” appears in every finance leadership discussion and means something different each time. Strategy documents use it as shorthand for growth. Consulting firms use it as a framework for selling transformation projects. Finance teams use it, often aspirationally, to describe what they would like to be doing rather than what they are actually doing.
Josh May, Partner Enablement Director EMEA at BlackLine, offers the clearest definition I have encountered: “activities that make a business more successful, whether financially, operationally or strategically.” Turning numbers into actionable guidance. Not producing the numbers. Using them to help the business make better decisions.
That is the practical gap. Most finance teams are producing the numbers. Fewer are doing what May describes. The question is not why the gap exists. It is what actually closes it.
Why most finance teams are not creating value yet
The honest answer is time. Month-end close, statutory compliance, management accounts, board pack preparation, audit support: the production workload consumes most of the capacity available. By the time the numbers are ready, the window for influencing the decision has often closed.
I have led finance functions where this was the reality. Capable people, constrained by the structure. Systems requiring too much manual intervention. Processes too slow to generate insight when it would be useful. The result: a finance function that was technically competent and commercially absent.
Richard Davis, founder of FNLY, puts what the alternative looks like directly: “It means being in the room, delivering information, having a viewpoint and not just being a ‘yes’ person.” The finance function that is not in the room when decisions are made is not creating value. It is documenting the aftermath.
This is why AI readiness matters beyond automation efficiency. When AI handles the reconciliations, the routine reporting, the variance flagging, the capacity it frees is the capacity that makes value creation possible. Not in theory. In practice, because the hours now exist.
Three ways finance actually creates value
Dr Kamran Shaikh, Managing Director of Morgan Reach, identifies three areas where finance has real impact on business outcomes.
The first is decision quality: contributing meaningfully to market entry decisions, capex return assessments, and pricing analysis before the decision is made, not reporting on it afterwards. I rebuilt one of my businesses as a digital-first operation after Brexit destroyed the wholesale model overnight. The finance function’s role shifted during that period from documenting performance to shaping the decisions that drove it. The shift was not structural. It happened because the production burden reduced enough that time existed to do the higher-value work.
The second is scenario and risk analysis. Dr Arthur Pleijsier of Straetegic Consulting makes this concrete: in the current tariff environment, understanding exactly where value is created in your supply chain, where you manufacture, where you sell, and which value generators are exposed to disruption, is the analysis that enables strategic response rather than operational scramble. AI can help here, incorporating macroeconomic indicators, operational data, and historical trends into forecasting that updates as conditions change.
The third is capital discipline. “Value creation also means that finance teams are rigorous in how they allocate resources,” Shaikh says. The most effective finance leaders do not just control costs. They link finance to strategy, technology, and talent, connecting capital allocation to enterprise goals rather than treating it as a separate budgeting exercise.
Making value creation measurable
Pleijsier raises a question most organisations have not answered clearly: if a subsidiary or business unit creates significant value, can you put a number on it? How does that tie into the financial statements?
Financial reporting is often purely based on financial parameters. How a particular part of the business contributes to overall value can be neglected or measured inconsistently. Tax authorities are increasingly expecting firms to report on value creation, which means the analytical framework is becoming a compliance requirement, not just a strategic choice.
Transfer pricing, the discipline of setting prices for transactions between related entities within a group, is useful here even beyond its tax function. It forces precision about where value is created and what that contribution is worth. The transfer pricing framework I developed for a major UK PLC covering 1,000+ group entities, which reduced the group’s tax burden by £125m while maintaining full regulatory compliance, was fundamentally about identifying where value sat within a complex structure and putting defensible numbers on it.
Finance teams that build this analytical capability are better positioned to advise on strategic decisions and to satisfy the growing regulatory expectation that organisations can account for where their value comes from.
Being visible in the business
Davis’s point about being in the room connects to a broader point about visibility. Melanie Robinson, Deputy CEO at the Institute of Leadership, frames it in terms of empathy: “Try to see other people’s points of view on contentious issues.”
The finance function that operates as an auditor of other people’s decisions is not creating value. The one that is embedded in commercial conversations, understands the operational drivers of the business, and can challenge assumptions in a way that improves decisions rather than blocking them, is.
Deloitte’s 2026 Finance Trends research, drawn from 1,326 global finance leaders, describes this shift as moving from stewardship to proactive leadership: partnering with business leaders, shaping strategy, and driving growth. 64% of respondents plan to add more technical skills to their finance functions over 2025 and 2026. That investment is partly about tools. It is mostly about creating the conditions for finance to do the work that tools cannot do.
How to know if it is working
Value creation is easier to aspire to than to measure. Production metrics, close cycle time, error rates, audit findings, measure whether the finance function is running its processes well. They do not measure whether it is improving business outcomes.
I track this with one question: what decisions did finance influence this month that the business would have made differently without us? If the answer is none, the function is producing. If the answer is three, it is creating value. The gap between those two answers is the transformation work.
The shift from reporting to value creation is not a strategy document or a restructure. It is an operational change that requires time, capability, and the structural conditions to support both. Finance functions that have invested in process and systems work have created the conditions. The ones that have not are still waiting for the time to do higher-value work. The time never arrives because the production burden fills every available hour.