The Hidden Cost of Not Having a Finance Person in the Room
I’ve noticed over the years that finance people tend to think slightly differently.
Not better. Not worse. Just differently.
Put a group of people on a Teams call and tell them about an exciting opportunity for the business, and they’ll naturally look at it through different lenses.
Someone focused on sales might be thinking about how to win the work.
Someone in operations might immediately start thinking about how they’re going to deliver it.
The business owner might be thinking about where the opportunity could lead.
And the finance person?
We tend to start asking questions.
When will we get paid? What will we need to spend first? What does it do to our margin?
But we’re also thinking about the bigger picture.
How does this fit with everything else we’ve already planned? Does it compete for cash with something else in the forecast? Does doing this now put pressure on something we’re planning to do three months from now?
It isn’t because finance people are naturally pessimistic.
It’s because we’re trained to think about consequences — and to see how one decision connects to everything else.
Finance often arrives too late
In lots of small and growing businesses, finance still sits slightly outside the day-to-day decision making.
The numbers are kept up to date. Reports are produced. The accountant does what they need to do, but often at arm’s length from the business.
But there’s a difference between having good financial information and having a financial perspective in the conversation.
If I look at your numbers at the end of the month and tell you that your margins fell because you needed far more freelance support than expected, that’s useful.
But the more valuable conversation probably happened before you agreed the work.
What will it actually take to deliver this? Have we allowed for that in the price? And what happens to cash while we’re waiting to be paid?
You might still make exactly the same decision.
The difference is that you make it knowing what needs to be true for the answer to be yes.
Finance shouldn’t be the department of no
There’s an old stereotype of the finance person being the one who pours cold water on everyone else’s ideas.
I don’t particularly like it.
A good finance person isn’t there to find reasons why something can’t happen.
They’re there to help work out how it can.
Sometimes that means challenging an assumption. Sometimes it means running the numbers. And sometimes it means asking one question that nobody else in the conversation had thought to ask.
That different perspective is the value.
The hidden cost
The cost of not having that perspective isn’t always obvious.
There might not be one disastrous decision that you can point to.
Instead, decisions get made and finance explains the consequences afterwards.
And I think that’s the wrong way around.
Finance shouldn’t just record the consequences of business decisions.
It should help shape them.
It means recognising when a decision has financial consequences and bringing that perspective into the conversation while there is still time to influence it.
Bring finance into the conversation earlier
You don’t need a finance person sitting in every meeting.
And having someone who understands the numbers doesn’t mean handing your decisions over to them.
The business owner still makes the decision.
But when you’re talking about recruitment, pricing, investment, capacity, new clients or future plans, there’s real value in having someone there whose brain naturally asks a different set of questions.
Because your finance person is useful when they can explain what happened last month.
They can be much more valuable when they’re part of the conversation about what happens next.
I’m Sarah Hands, founder of SJ Accountancy. I work with growing businesses that want more than reports and year-end numbers. I help business owners understand their finances, plan ahead and make confident decisions about what comes next.
If you’d value having a finance person in the conversation earlier, let’s have a chat.