A week in the life of… a director of finance

Wednesday

Today’s focus was setting budgets for next year. I spent a bit of time updating the models and checking them. It was concentrated work, which meant by the end of the day my eyes were tired from staring at lots of numbers all day. I did have a break at lunchtime – someone in my team scheduled a lunch and chat video call, so even though we were staring at a screen, it was a bit of the usual chit-chat about Christmas, families, and what we watched on the telly. It almost felt like a normal lunch break. That inspired me to spend a little bit of time on my diary and I was ruthless in my rescheduling of meetings to ensure I could have a break every day next week.

Thursday

I spent quite a bit of time in a data-gathering workshop, as we are embarking on a new housing management system and it’s really important that the needs of finance are considered in the design stage so that we can make sure we can create accounts for, and report on, all expenditure going through the new system. I also spent some time thinking about a campaign to get colleagues to consider data quality and getting it right first time. I was supporting our communications colleagues with how we should run that campaign with ideas on different topics each month, so month one might be a focus on cleansing old data, month two could be controls over data, and month three some case studies on data-driven decisions.

Friday

Today was a head-down day, a number-crunching and analytical treat. I had queries from two different sections of the Regulator of Social Housing, about two different regulatory returns. So I knuckled down, understood the queries and set about responding. Sometimes the response is about providing additional context, so for one of the queries, I picked up the phone and had a really good chat, mostly about what she was looking for in my response but also just for a bit of human contact for that day.

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