Specific Models for Romanian Companies - Finance Shared Services

Shared services are a type of intra-corporate activity for support functions such as information technology, finance, purchasing, marketing. Out of these functions, the finance shared services are singled out in this paper. The activities pertaining to the finance department are analyzed according to The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants ACCA professional standard. Some of these activities are highly suitable to be managed as iterative back-office processes, such as the receivables account and the payables account. We propose several finance shared services business models which we have found evidence of in Romania. Finance shared services may be managed as pools of diversified activities, as simple iterative processes (such as invoices), as end to end accounting processes, or as inclusive solutions which involve other functional areas such as credit management and purchasing. Evidence of Romanian companies providing such services has been collected using Internet resources such as job advertising sites, company web sites and the media. In Romania, there are a variety of shared service and business process outsourcing providers, such as Continental Automotive, Hella, Oracle, British American Shared Services, Hewlett Packard, Bosch, Accenture, Genpact. The purpose of this paper is to exemplify the benefits brought by one type of shared service and its value proposition potential. This article is part of a research on value based management, in which the particular case of intra-corporate business value pattern is analyzed for production, research and development, and overheads (shared services). Intra-corporate business is managed using the transfer price which is different from the market price, and this is one reason why we call this business model “specific”. The other reason is that Romania as a location offers the very advantages shared service providers seek.