In its recent report “UnlockingPotential: Finance effectiveness benchmark study 2013,” PwCbenchmarked the finance functions of more than 200 companies basedon their performance in everything from the quality of theirbudgets and financial forecasts to the efficiency of theirtransactional processes to their effectiveness in treasury, riskmanagement, tax compliance, and audit. Then it grouped the financeteams into quartiles and compared them across a variety ofcharacteristics.

In terms of efficiency, the survey found that the cost offinance for top-quartile businesses is 0.56 percent of corporaterevenue. For the median company, that number is 0.93 percent—so theproportion of corporate revenue that goes toward finance costs isnearly two-thirds higher for the typical finance function than fortop teams.

Moreover, leading finance functions are using their slice of thebudget to do a lot more analysis. In the median company, thefinance team spends nearly two-thirds of their time on datagathering and just over one-third on analysis. For top-quartilefinance teams, that ratio is much closer to 50:50 (see Figure1).