Most finance leaders are comfortable benchmarking performance, some even enjoy it!
Comparing costs, productivity, processing times, and cash positions because those measures are visible, tangible, and easy to understand. The moment someone suggests benchmarking control; however, the conversation tends to become much more complicated.
Part of the reason is that control doesn’t naturally present itself as a metric. Nobody walks into a board meeting and proudly announces that the organisation scored 8.7 out of 10 for control. Instead, control tends to reveal itself indirectly through confidence. Confidence in forecasts. Confidence in liabilities. Confidence that approvals are happening when they should. Confidence that the numbers being presented are accurate and supported by evidence. When that confidence starts to weaken, finance leaders begin to feel it long before they can necessarily explain it.
What makes this particularly difficult is that most organisations don’t experience a sudden loss of control. The process is usually far more gradual than that. A business grows, acquires new suppliers, enters new markets, adds additional approvers, and adopts new systems. None of those changes are problematic in isolation. In fact, they’re often signs of success. The challenge is that the processes supporting the business do not always evolve at the same pace as the business itself. Eventually finance teams find themselves using workarounds to get the answers they need, working harder simply to maintain the same level of visibility they once enjoyed almost effortlessly.
This is often why finance leaders describe a sense that things have become more difficult without being able to point to a single cause. Month-end seems to require more effort. Forecasting discussions involve more caveats than they used to. Questions that should be straightforward take longer to answer. Information exists, but it exists in multiple places, across several systems and sometimes only in the experience of the people who know where to look. Nothing appears broken, yet the organisation feels increasingly dependent on manual effort to keep moving forward.
That is precisely why benchmarking the Finance Control Gap can be so valuable. Not because it produces a score or a maturity rating, but because it creates a structured opportunity to look critically at assumptions that often go unchallenged. It forces organisations to ask whether they genuinely have visibility before money is committed, whether approvals are consistently evidenced, whether liabilities can be accurately explained at any point in time and whether growth could continue without requiring a proportional increase in manual effort. Those questions are often far more revealing than any measure of invoice throughput or processing efficiency.
One of the more interesting findings from recent finance research is that increased automation has not necessarily translated into increased confidence. Organisations continue to invest heavily in digital transformation, yet many finance leaders still report approval delays, weak visibility, duplicate payments, and reporting pressures. Global research found that 85% of finance teams now report some level of AP automation, yet 96% say late-payment management still contributes to stress and burnout. Those findings suggest that while automation may remove certain tasks, it does not automatically eliminate the underlying weaknesses that create operational pressure.
This is why benchmarking needs to move beyond what technology has been implemented and focus instead on what outcomes that technology is delivering. A process can be digital and yet still lack visibility. An approval can be automated and still create a bottleneck. Information can be captured electronically whilst remaining difficult to access when decisions need to be made. The question is no longer whether the organisation has adopted technology. More importantly finance leaders should ask themselves if they have the confidence that the process is producing reliable, explainable, and controllable outcomes.
Perhaps the simplest benchmark question of all is this: if transaction volumes increased significantly tomorrow, would the organisation need more people to maintain the same level of control?
The answer to this tends to reveal a great deal. Strong control environments generally find that growth places pressure on systems and processes, but not necessarily on headcount. In contrast weaker control environments find more volume results in more spreadsheets, more reconciliations, more chasing and more manual intervention. In other words, they are scaling effort rather than scaling control.
The purpose of benchmarking, therefore, isn’t to prove that something is wrong. Most finance functions are built with capable teams working incredibly hard to keep the organisation moving forward. The purpose is to identify where confidence is strongest, where visibility is weakest and where future growth is most likely to expose stresses that are currently being absorbed through experience and determination. By understanding those areas before they become problems, finance leaders put themselves in a much stronger position to support growth, improve reporting confidence and create a more resilient operating model for the future.
