Accounting revolution from below

My 3rd article on #entrepreneurialfinance…

Dear Finance professional,

Every CFO wants global standardization ini accounting.

But finance teams on the ground know why it keeps failing.

Of course, to become more efficient in Finance, you need to standardize and optimize accounting processes.

But everyone who has tried it can attest: Standardizing order-to-cash, purchase-to-pay, and record-to-report in a global organization is no easy feat. Policies don’t change behavior. Sometimes, the front line complains that the policies are just stupid (and sometimes rightfully so.)

They just published a new 20-page accounting policy.

It’s basically impossible to follow day to day.

Accounting team lead

Typical tactic: Top-down standard setting

The typical playbook is familiar:

Define global standards
Publish policies
Train the organization
Monitor compliance

And yet, adoption remains slow. Variants remain.

Why? Because top-down standards scale documentation, not behavior.

Policies describe how work should be done, not how it can be done in different operational contexts
Local teams face real problems that the policy doesn’t solve
Compliance feels imposed, not owned
Process variants re-emerge faster than central teams can eliminate them

If you want real standardization, you need a mechanism that changes how people actually work.

A better approach: Standardization from below

Instead of pushing standards, let the best practices emerge from the teams doing the work.

A simple structure achieves this: The Monthly Accounting Excellence Roundtable. A voluntary, cross-regional forum for frontline SSC teams on solving concrete problems where they occur:

Identify common problems that slow month-end
Share potential solutions and solution ideas
Document effective solutions in a way they can be shared with the teams
Build person-to-person connections to help each other

This is where real standardization happens — not in a policy document, but in the conversations where people discover better ways of working and spread them peer-to-peer.

Policies follow behavior, not the other way around.

In modern Finance, policies don’t create standardization - communities do.

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Focus on bottom-up teaming

To ensure this is effective, keep hyper-focused on making this useful:

Voluntary participation - if it’s not useful, nobody will come
Agenda defined by participants - global is only a facilitator
Not more than 10-15 people - to have a real discussion
Performance data sharing - in order to see who to learn from
Co-creation of solutions - leading by example, not by power

This approach ensures, that you develop standards that actually help, that really improve performance, that make a difference at the front.

Thanks for reading CFO Impulse! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Practical takeaway: To improve your accounting processes, set up a “Monthly Accounting Excellence Roundtable”. You will get global standards that get adopted because they actually work.

Have top-down standards failed in your organization? What’s your experience?

Regards,

Sebastian

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PS: Check out my first article on “Entrepreneurial Finance” here: