While considerably more of the 100 finance teams questioned claim their roles involve “engagement in insight activity” compared with a year ago, only one in ten finance professionals describes themselves as a true business partner (barely an increase on 2008 figures). And this against a backdrop of widespread dissatisfaction with management information – 68% said they were dissatisfied -- and little evidence of any increased investment in this area. Companies may be talking the talk on business partnering but a lack of training, resources and business acumen means that far fewer are walking the walk.

 By business partnering, PwC means those whose roles revolve around influencing, designing and executing business strategy and planning, as opposed to number crunching. It’s certainly no new concept. “Ten years ago everyone talked about shared services and taking the transactional element of finance away. It was a blanket assumption that proved to be wrong. What’s clear is that efficient provision of information is key. You need the people and processes in place to make it work and an IT system that can support that,” report author and PwC partner Nick Jarman explains.

The mismatch between business expectations and finance’s ability to deliver are at least in part down to the conflicting pressures finance faces, which have become all the more apparent as we exit the downturn. “Finance functions, focused for so long on compliance and control, have found themselves under great pressure to tightly manage costs and provide more and better management information to the business,” Jarman says.

CFOs, the report says, “are juggling to achieve the right balance between three competing agendas; insight, efficiency, and compliance and control – in addition to managing and motivating their people. They want to ensure the way they are steering the function and partnering the business is building towards a high performing function and one which is recognised as integral to success.”

What’s clear is that boards are looking to their finance functions to provide more active input into decision-making. In practice, however, it is not always clear how finance functions should fulfil this business partnering role. “It’s important to get the basics right. You need to produce a P&L rapidly then engage with the users of information and find out what they want from finance. Then it’s a case of looking at what data you have available to you currently and seeing where the gaps are,” Jarman says.

Jarman says some accounting institutes, notably ACCA and CIMA, are doing a good job of addressing the need for more business-oriented skills in their accountancy curricula, as are MBA courses in finance. But rather than rely on “oven-ready” accountants, companies too need to shoulder some responsibility for investing in the skills so desperately sought after by business.

Mark Freebairn, a partner and head of the financial management practice at headhunter Odgers Berndtson described the report as “unfairly negative”. “Finance can do more and business wants it to. That’s both a positive and a negative. It’s also up to people to create better output from the finance function. And if the business wants that they need to invest in people who are able to deliver,” Freebairn said.

“Two thirds of respondents to the survey see finance as a support group for the CEO. That has stepped up quite a long way. The profile of the CFO has been moving towards strategic business partner for some time. There’s an expectation that people can do the technical stuff, but at the end of the day you need both,” Freebairn adds.

Neil Warman is chief commercial and financial officer at HCL, a financial outsourcing company that manages £50 billion worth of mortgage accounts on behalf of UK lenders. He warns that those finance teams striving to fulfil a true business partnering role should prepare themselves for a long journey. “We’ve had to work out how we become more efficient, close the books quicker, and provide more value add to the rest of the business – improved forecasting to help the business optimise working capital and ultimately make better decisions.

“We have an aspiration to be a cutting edge finance department. The situation today means finance needs to run very fast just to keep still. The key is for finance teams to understand how all the other parts of the business interact. It’s about making sure you have the right people with the right skill set and a culture of ownership, responsibility and better information.”

That’s as much about recruiting the right calibre of people as it is about investing in training, Warman says. And finding broader business-focused accountants is still a tall order, despite a decade’s worth of talk about business partnering in finance, Warman warns. “Finding accountants who have a commercial outlook as well as underlying financial skills is still very, very hard.”