The following is a guest post from Glenn Oborne, director at Ingen Partners. Opinions are the author’s own.

Finance transformation can leave a CFO accountable for processes they no longer fully control.

Take a reporting process that once sat almost entirely within finance. Today, operational teams may own key data, technology manages the platform, a shared-service center handles processing and automated controls perform checks that finance staff once carried out themselves.

On a normal day, that can work very well. The problem appears when something unusual happens.

A figure looks wrong just before reporting closes. Finance thinks the process should stop. Operations says the underlying data is correct. Technology confirms the system has behaved as designed.

Who decides what happens next? The answer is not always as clear as the redesigned workflow.

Where accountability gets fuzzy

Transformation programs tend to be good at deciding where work should sit. Processes are mapped. Tasks move. Automation removes manual steps. Activities are transferred to shared services or specialist teams. What can lag is the authority attached to those tasks.

Finance may still be responsible for the integrity of the final output while having little direct control over the data, systems or people producing parts of it.

That is manageable when everyone understands where responsibility begins and ends. It becomes harder when each team owns its part of the process, but nobody has clear authority over a problem that crosses several parts at once.

Financial reporting is an obvious example, but the same problem can appear in payments, forecasting, master data, revenue recognition and other areas where finance now depends heavily on functions outside its own team.

The awkward cases are rarely the routine ones. They are the exceptions.

Test what happens when the process breaks

A process map can show every hand-off correctly and still tell you very little about what happens when two functions disagree.

Suppose an automated control flags an unusual transaction. Finance wants it held. Operations believes it is commercially legitimate. Technology says the system has done exactly what it was designed to do. Who has the final call?

If the answer depends on who happens to be available, or on escalating until someone senior enough makes a decision, the operating model probably has a gap. That gap can remain hidden for a long time because most transformed processes work as intended most of the time. Efficiency measures will not necessarily expose it either.

A program can reduce cost, shorten cycle times and remove manual work while making ownership less clear when something goes wrong. CFOs should therefore test more than whether the new process works. Pick a few important finance processes that have changed materially and run a realistic failure scenario through each one.

Ask:

• Who notices the problem first?
• Who can act immediately?
• Who resolves a disagreement between functions?
• Who owns the outcome?

The answers don't need to sit entirely within finance; they do need to be clear.

Authority needs to move with the work

The answer is not to bring everything back under the CFO.

Modern finance functions depend on technology, data teams, shared services and colleagues across the business. That is unlikely to change. But where finance remains accountable for an outcome, the CFO needs enough authority to influence the parts of the process that determine it.

Sometimes that will mean clearer ownership elsewhere. Sometimes finance needs explicit decision rights. In other cases, all that is missing is a defined escalation route for the relatively small number of situations where responsibilities overlap.

What matters is that somebody has thought about it before the failure occurs. This is particularly important after several rounds of transformation. Processes rarely change once. They evolve gradually as systems are replaced, work is outsourced, teams are centralized and new automation is introduced. Each change may be sensible on its own. 

After a few years, however, responsibility can end up scattered across an organization in ways nobody deliberately designed. That is when CFOs should revisit the operating model rather than assume the old accountabilities still make sense. A useful question is simple: if this process failed tomorrow, would everybody involved know who had the authority to make the difficult decision?

If the answer is unclear, the transformation is not quite finished.