Finance Business Partnering Course

Course overview

The role of a finance business partner is to combine their professional, technical ability with commercial challenge, guidance and support for those outside of their team.

This inspires business success through linking financial goals with business strategies and operations. Our Finance Business Partnering course provides your finance professionals with the skills needed to drive your business forward as well as the confidence to do so.

A successful finance business partner knows much more than how to track and report historic financial performance. Their communication skills enable them to easily convey critical financial information that propels essential business financial planning and decision-making. They are able to influence their key stakeholders and are passionate in guiding them in the right direction. They provide support to them in overcoming the challenges they are facing, both operationally and strategically. A finance business partner role requires the ability to comfortably share commercial insights and strategic thinking.

Our Finance Business Partnering course provides the foundations and pillars for your team to draw upon, moving them from traditional finance functions to a true business finance partnership. Not only will they learn the right skills and have relevant tools to hand, your team will also have the confidence to use them within your business.

Course Content

What will you learn?

The finance hexagon, looking backwards and forwards, operationally, strategically and financially. Finding where your team are already performing well and action planning to improve the areas that will add the most value to the business moving forward.
The temple model of finance business partnering. Unpacking the foundations and pillars to be clear on the essential components of a successful finance business partner.
Developing a robust commercial mindset: the nine factors that are vital for guiding stakeholders in making the business decisions and recommendations with the best commercial impact. This includes areas such as how to incorporate market awareness, customer focus and joined-up thinking as well as macro-economic factors.
Strategic thinking: the building blocks that are critical for moving your team and business towards top-level success and the strategic responses to unforeseen threats and challenges.

Developing stronger influencing skills: treating people as you wish to be treated is a good start but imagine the results if your team could understand how to spot other people’s preferences and treat them as they wish to be treated. Your team will work on techniques to identify their stakeholders’ behavioural preferences and have the ability to adapt their style to meet these. This will be applied to typical situations that a strategic finance business partner will find themselves in.
Passion, attitude and enthusiasm: looking inwardly, what is driving you and how does your finance business partner role link to these core elements? What happens when one of these is missing and what should you do about it?
Growing even more effective communication skills: a successful finance business partner needs to communicate in many ways to people outside of finance. How can you adapt and improve your communication techniques for each communication method?

This Finance Business Partnering course is very flexible and the content above can be adjusted to suit your team’s needs. We can collaborate with you and your internal Learning and Development team to assess and identify your team’s learning requirements and create a programme that really hits the spot. Please take a look at our bespoke learning page to find out more or get in touch to discuss how we can do this for you.

Bespoke Learning

You can find more details of how we do this on our bespoke learning page.

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Bespoke Learning

Who this course is aimed at

Our Finance Business Partnering course is relevant for any finance team that wishes to enhance their finance business partner skills and be even better placed to support their key stakeholders, driving business success. Because of the flexibility on course content, we can easily adapt the programme to suit your team’s specific needs. Please contact us to discuss how we do this or visit our bespoke learning page for further information.

Course objective

Your team will be equipped with the essential financial business partner skills to transform them from a traditional finance function to highly successful finance business partners. Through practical application during the course, serious action planning and reviews over a period of time, your people will be confident in guiding business decision making and informing strategy.

Practical information

This Finance Business Partnering course works well when broken into smaller modules and facilitated over several months. We would ideally have 1-2 months break between modules, allowing time for your Finance Business Partners to put their actions into practice. At the beginning of each subsequent module, we will revisit those actions, discuss successes as well as challenges faced and plan practical ways of overcoming blockers.

Our finance team now feel significantly more confident in speaking to and working with the rest of the business around problem solving and strategy. They are also feeling more resilient when facing challenges.

PARTICIPANT, BRE (BUILDINGS RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT)

Why work with Complete Financial Training?

We are the home of specialists in financial and commercial learning.

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