In a recent article I read there was a discussion that for some of Australia’s largest companies there is now a clear trend to decentralise accounting functions back to the divisions, rather than having a large, centralised shared services team. The expectation is that these Decentralised accounting teams will be closer to the business and provide far better commercial insight. Are you seeing this in your company?
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India Head and Director of Global Finance Shared Services in Hardwarea year ago
No, we are not seeing this in our organization. The "In-Countries" operations should only have statutory compliances and roles that require dealing with Tax authorities. The normal accounting roles in decentralized set up will not only significantly add to the cost but will create lot of duplication of work and process inefficiencies. In the current time, when connectivity is excellent and centralized and cloud-based tools are there, the need for decentralized way of working has been eliminated. So, it not logical to operate in a decentralized manner and I am not hearing about such developments in my Industry Forums or Peer groups also. Director of Finance in Consumer Goodsa year ago
Decentralizing accounting functions will enormously increase the cost. Uniformity in following accounting policies will also be impacted.Therefore, it becomes imperative to have captive or third party shared services and there is no change management planned in our organization.