Career Progression Briefing: Negotiating in Finance

Negotiation in Finance

Accountants engage in negotiation as they go about their daily work. They’ll negotiate with clients over audit deliverables, with their stakeholders in a business over how much time they have to produce month-end reports, or as part of the process of budget setting.

An auditor will negotiate the trickier parts of an audit position, attempting to get a client to accept an important, but perhaps inconvenient, adjustment to the numbers - an impairment here, an extra provision there. A management accountant would negotiate budgets with managers all over the organisation, as they negotiate the politics of annual budgeting. A credit controller will negotiate with customers to try to reduce the number of days it takes them to pay. Accountants negotiate all the time – so much so that they sometimes don’t notice they are doing it.

Here are some examples that most accountants will recognise:

Finance Directors and CFOs might be involved in negotiating terms with major supply chain partners or customers as part of a multi-functional team. These can be large multi-faceted negotiations that take months to complete and are revisited over the years. A treasury professional will negotiate with banks and other sources of finance to ensure adequate funding for business activities.

NEGOTIATING IN FINANCE | NEGOTIATION IN FINANCE

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