Finance Journey

Start Your Finance Journey here 

Are you here to simply keep the score? Or to drive impact? 

Finance professionals don’t exist just to process invoices, apply controls and report the figures. They do that, of course, and it’s vital to the financial health and sustainability of an organisation. But they deliver so much more.  

Finance experts not only keep the doors open, they help your organisation to understand what's happening and why.  

Crucially, when finance professionals have the confidence and space to lead, they drive performance and shape futures that are more impactful, for longer.

"Finance teams should not be solely a back-office or technical function, they should be at the heart of decision-making."

Caron Bradshaw OBE

The Finance Journey is for you, your team and your organisation, but ultimately, it’s about the people and communities you serve. The Finance Journey helps you make an important promise to them: your organisation will be around for as long as they need it to be. 
 

Who is The Finance Journey for? 

The Finance Journey is for everyone in charitable and for-purpose organisations who is concerned with their organisation’s financial health and sustainability. It’s for every organisation, whatever its size.  

Whether you’re leading a sizeable team or department, or flying solo in a small charity wearing many hats, The Finance Journey supports you, your colleagues’ and your organisation’s journey to greater impact and transformation.   

The Finance Journey will support you to: 

  1. Master charity finance 

  1. Boost your impact and your team’s 

  1. Build your leadership and transformational skills

"The Finance Journey at the Varkey Foundation contributed to the creation of a sustainable financial framework through a model that resulted in the total transformation of the way the organisation operated…"

Pete Knight (formerly The Varkey Foundation)

These are just some of the reasons why charitable organisations start their Finance Journey

  • Perhaps you’re at the beginning of your career in charity finance and want to understand how you can develop your skills further. 

  • You might be mid-career and know you can lead, but the transition to the next stage feels challenging alone.  

  • You could be a senior finance professional or experienced charity leader who needs to brush up on their technical knowledge, build a team or support the finance function.  

  • Your team is growing, contracting or adapting and you want to better understand the skills you’ve got covered, as well as those you haven’t. 

  • You’re planning your team’s training and development and want to focus the budget on the gaps that matter most, rather than spreading it thinly. 

  • You want your team to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow with confidence, and as business partners with strategic insight. 

  • You want to be sure your organisation is as financially sustainable and resilient as it possibly can be. 

  • You’re adapting to or planning change and leadership from the finance function is a vital component to delivery and success.  

  • You know that a confident and informed finance function supports decision-making and leads to better outcomes. 

"The Finance Journey is a framework, a simple piece of logic, that helped us have more meaningful conversations about how we can develop, from getting the foundations right to shaping the future of our organisation. And it helped us to get to where we needed to go."

Dan Haigh St Richard’s Hospice

What is The Finance Journey model? 


The Finance Journey sets out seven levels of contribution that finance can make to an organisation, from accurate and efficient processing right through to transformation. 

Effective strategic leadership depends on strong technical foundations, so each level builds on those beneath it. That’s why we call it a journey: it describes a progression through distinct stages of capability and the levels are cumulative. 

The first four levels of this evolutionary model will be totally familiar to most finance people. These are the foundations on which great leadership and insight are built.  

By working through the levels of The Finance Journey you will confidently understand:  

  • how things work 

  • what’s happening 

  • why these things are happening 

As you progress further through The Finance Journey, you will be able to: 

  • see how the organisation can improve and work towards it 

  • set out a vision based on evidence  

  • articulate a vision of the future and help make it happen 

 
Whoever and wherever you are, The Finance Journey can support your professional development, your finance function and, at the same time, strengthen your organisation.  

Find out more

If you’d like to find out more about how to get started on Your Finance Journey, please register your interest by completing this form.

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The primary purpose [of The Finance Journey] is to lay out a development path for both individuals in key finance positions as well as finance functions as a whole; a development path that recognises the traditional activities, whilst at the same time outlining a way in which those activities can be the foundation for a broader contribution to an organisation – one which involves driving performance, articulating a realistic and coherent view of the future and transforming the organisation to bring that future about.”

Simon Hopkins Author of The Finance Journey