Why is a portfolio required?

Awards for which you are nominated out of the blue or merely on the basis of publicly available information? We don’t like those. 

The accomplishments of a finance department are not always visible to the world at large. The jury will need detailed information to be able to assess properly what your team stands for. A solid portfolio is indispensible.

 

Won’t submitting a portfolio require a lot of my time, human resources and teeth grinding?

Those – understandably – are the most common questions. But if we had no satisfying comeback to that, we would already have run out of candidates. To be clear: our editorial team will compile the portfolio. We won’t need you to spend days, although you and/or a few of your team members will have to tell us your story, of course. We will turn that into a portfolio that you can correct or to which you can add if you feel it is necessary. 

In detail? To get your full candicacy past the jury, we count on up to 5 hours of your cooperation: 2 hours of interview, 2 hours of reading and checking, 0.5 hours to meet the jury, 0.5 hours for photo and video.

 

What if your project is not finished yet?

Well. That’s an argument to which we have little to say in return. Keep in mind that projects of a financial department are never finished. That applies to the winners of previous years too. There are always new challenges, and improvements to follow. 

You have to have the courage to look back and be proud of what you have already realised. Morevover, participating is a highly original way to thank your staff for their efforts and engagement. 

 

Imagine: Your team is the best but there was no real project in the past year?

That is not a problem. To the contrary. We like the candidacy of finance departments that use their development and approach of the past few years as input for the case. It is perfectly possible to highlight a few elements from within that longer period. Unless you and your employees have been sitting back without doing anything in recent years, every team has always sufficient starting points to support its candidacy.

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Someone has just left your team. Bad timing, isn’t it?

It is a team award. It does not depend on one person. And to keep your team motivated, looking back on its accomplishments – and expressing appreciations for them – will help a great deal. 

 

You just took on a new one, who still has to find his or her way. 

So what? Your colleague will know right away that the threshold is high and that he/she has landed in a potential Best Finance Team. The work involved in the candidacy is for our editorial team, anyway. One more team member, or one less, it doesn’t matter.

 

Things have been tough in your sector in recent years.

Whether your company is going through a rough patch or displaying double-digit growth, we will only look at the performance and accomplishments of the finance department. In other words, it is not a company’s boundless growth that makes its finance people present a better case, and it’s not the opposite either.

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There are other, larger companies that are doing really well. You consider your own accomplishments ordinary…

It is a typical characteristic of finance profiles to remain modest and downplay their contributions. “It is all pretty normal, the stuff that we do.’ Stop right there. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pride is not out of place, certainly not with regard to your own company. Because that is what it is about. The assessment of the project will take place from within the specific company context.

Anyway, we created different award categories to be able to compare as many cases of a similar maturity and companies of similar sizes.

  

You would like to remain discrete.

And we will respect that. We will only make those details public that you agree with. In advance, we will make a film or animation about your candidacy. You can rest easy. You won’t have to jump onto the stage during the award ceremony to address those one thousand other people in the room. You can stay nicely within your comfort zone during the entire course of events.

 

You’ve participated before.

So? Time has not stood still. Matters evolve and new initiatives constantly have to be noticed and evaluated. We have plenty of examples of teams who went to battle twice, or even three times.

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