Most finance functions now have business partners. Far fewer can name a decision those partners changed. Adrian Lawrence FCA explains why the role so often stalls, and what boards and finance leaders can do to make it pay.
Ask a finance director whether their business has finance business partners and the answer is almost always yes. Ask which commercial decision a business partner changed last quarter, and the room tends to go quiet.
That gap matters. Over the past decade and more, business partnering has become the standard model for organising finance in mid-sized and large companies. Accounting bodies promote it, job titles have followed, and most finance transformation programmes promise that automation will free accountants from reporting so they can “partner the business”. In many organisations the title has changed far faster than the work.
The result is an expensive role that too often behaves like a more senior management accountant. Its holder produces better-presented numbers and attends more meetings, but the pricing, investment and resourcing decisions are made the same way they always were. Having recruited qualified finance professionals for many years, and having sat on the other side of the table as a Finance Director, I see the same handful of causes again and again. Almost all of them are within the board’s power to fix.
Why business partnering stalls
- Reporting crowds it out. In most finance teams, the business partner still owns part of the month-end close, or is the person everyone turns to when the management accounts are late. Reporting has a hard deadline; partnering does not. So for the first ten working days of every month, the partner disappears into the ledger, and the commercial conversations that should have happened in that window happen without them. If partnering only gets the time left over after reporting, it will never get enough.
- The wrong person is in the role. Many business partners are promoted from management accounting. Some make the transition brilliantly. Others are excellent technicians who are uncomfortable telling a commercial director that a contract will lose money. The skills that make someone a reliable producer of accurate numbers, such as precision, caution and process, are not the skills that change decisions: curiosity about how the business makes money, confidence to challenge people more senior than yourself, and the ability to explain a model in three sentences to someone who has never opened a spreadsheet.
- The mandate is vague. “Support the commercial team” is not a job. Without a clear answer to which decisions the partner is expected to influence, and who they report insight to, the role drifts towards whatever the loudest stakeholder asks for, usually ad hoc reports. The partner becomes a bureau service with a better title.
- The data is not there. A partner asked to improve pricing decisions needs customer and product profitability. A partner asked to challenge capital investment needs a consistent way to compare cases and track benefits afterwards. In many mid-sized businesses, neither exists. The partner spends a year building spreadsheets that should have been systems, and by the time the information is good enough to argue with, the business has lost patience with the role.
What effective partnering looks like
The businesses that get real value from business partnering tend to do four things differently.
They separate partnering from reporting. The partner may use the management accounts every day, but they do not produce them. Where the finance team is too small for a full split, the partner’s close responsibilities are deliberately capped, and someone else is named as the fallback when the timetable slips.
They give each partner a short list of decisions. Not a list of stakeholders, but a list of the three or four decisions in their area that matter most this year: the pricing review, the new site, the customer contracts up for renewal, the headcount plan. The partner is expected to have a view on each before it reaches the board, and to be in the room when it is made.
They give the partner a seat, not a summons. A partner who is invited to present numbers at the end of a meeting has already lost. The partners who change outcomes sit in the weekly commercial or operations meeting as a standing member, see proposals while they are still being shaped, and are expected to say so early when something does not add up.
They measure decisions, not deliverables. Counting reports produced or queries answered rewards exactly the behaviour that turns a partner into a bureau. A better test is simple and uncomfortable: at each quarter end, ask the partner and their stakeholders to list the decisions that were changed, stopped or reshaped by the partner’s analysis, and roughly what that was worth. A product not launched because its margin would not hold. A customer repriced or exited. A capital project resized before the money was committed. If that list is empty two quarters running, something in the model needs to change.
None of this requires a large finance team. In a business of fifty or sixty million pounds in turnover, one well-chosen partner with a clear mandate and access to the commercial meeting can be worth more than a team of three who are buried in month-end.
Hiring for influence, not output
When the role is set up properly, the remaining question is who fills it. Here, most hiring processes test the wrong things. A CV shows a qualification, years of experience and the systems a candidate has used. It rarely shows whether that person has ever changed someone’s mind.
Three interview questions do more than any technical test to separate the two kinds of candidates.
- “Give me an example where your analysis changed a commercial decision.” Strong candidates name the decision, the analysis behind it and what happened differently as a result. Weaker ones describe analysis that “informed” or “supported” decisions without being able to point to one that moved.
- “Tell me about a time you told someone more senior that their proposal did not work.” You are listening for a real case, how the evidence was presented, and how they handled being overruled, because good partners are overruled regularly.
- “Explain your current employer’s business model to someone outside finance.” A genuine partner can describe how the business makes money, where its costs sit and what could go wrong, in plain language and without slides.
It also pays to be precise about which kind of partner you need. A commercial partner working on pricing and customer profitability needs different strengths from an operational partner working on cost to serve, or a capital projects partner building and tracking investment cases. Briefs that say only “finance business partner” tend to produce shortlists of capable generalists, none of whom is quite right. Specialist finance business partner recruitment starts from the decisions the role must influence and works back to the profile, rather than starting from the job title.
Finally, be realistic about pay. Business partners who can genuinely influence senior colleagues are scarce, and they know it. Pitching the role at management accountant rates, or expecting a partner to absorb a reporting workload as well, usually means hiring someone who will either struggle to challenge or leave within eighteen months.
A question for the board
Business partnering is not a failed idea. Where it works, it is one of the clearest returns a business can get from its finance function: better pricing, fewer bad investments, faster decisions with fewer surprises. Where it fails, it is usually because the organisation changed a job title and expected the behaviour to follow.
So the most useful question a board can ask is not “do we have finance business partners?” It is “which decisions did they change this year, and what were they worth?” If nobody can answer, the fix is rarely more partners. It is a clearer mandate, protected time, the data to argue with, and people who are hired for their ability to influence rather than their ability to report.
