Top 7 Challenges for Finance Shared Services and How Finance and Accounting Outsourcing Helps
Article
Finance and Accounting Shared Services and Global Business Services (GBS) models were originally designed to deliver scale, efficiency, and control.
Finance and Accounting Shared Services and Global Business Services (GBS) models were originally designed to deliver scale, efficiency, and control. For years, they have done exactly that, lowering cost-to-serve, accelerating transaction processing, and enabling consistent global operations.
Today, that baseline is no longer enough. Expectations of Finance Shared Services organizations are expanding beyond transactional efficiency (tactical accounting) toward broader business contribution (strategic finance). Increasingly, GBS leaders are being asked not just to process, but to enable insight, resilience, and strategic decision-making across the enterprise.
This shift places new demands on the operating model, and on the partners that support it. Traditional outsourcing approaches, optimized for cost take-out and standardization alone, are often ill-suited to the complexity, speed, accuracy, insights and analytics now required. What’s needed instead is a different kind of GBS outsourcing partner; one that can help organizations address modern operating challenges while supporting the transition toward genuine business value delivery.
Below are seven of the most common challenges facing Finance Shared Services teams today, and how leading organizations are responding, often with the support of more strategically aligned Finance and Accounting (F&A) outsourcing partners.
Challenge 1: Cost Efficiency vs Business Value in GBS
Most Shared Services organizations have already delivered their headline efficiency gains. Further cost reduction is possible, but incremental. Meanwhile, the business expects Finance to contribute more actively to real-time insights, planning, forecasting, and decision-making.
The tension emerges when operating models optimized for transactional throughput are asked to deliver insight:
- Early-stage teams remain locked in execution
- Scaling teams struggle to balance speed with control
- Mature teams deliver predictable outputs but limited strategic influence.
What Leading GBS Organizations Do Differently
They treat efficiency as a foundation, not the end goal. Transactional activity is stabilized, often through a combination of automation and F&A Outsourcing, to free internal teams for higher-value, judgment-driven work.
Challenge 2: Shared Services F&A Talent Gap
The increasing finance and accounting talent gap poses a structural risk to GBS organizations. The skills required in modern Finance Shared Services have shifted, and, while technical accounting remains essential, value increasingly lies in system fluency, data interpretation, exception management, and stakeholder engagement. The arrival of AI and automations adds an additional skill demand for finance professionals to adopt and utilise the power of these new generation tools in their operations.
Many Shared Services models were never designed to support this mix at scale:
- In smaller organizations, knowledge concentration creates fragility
- In scaleups, demand outpaces capability development
- In large enterprises, role design makes skills difficult to refresh.
They adopt blended delivery models. Internal capability is developed where it differentiates the business, while F&A Outsourcing Partners are used to provide depth, continuity, and specialist skills that are hard to build or retain internally, especially around new technologies.
Challenge 3: Fragmentation Undermines the Premise of ‘Shared’ Services
Centralization does not guarantee consistency. Over time, local exceptions, regional variations, and legacy processes reintroduce complexity, often invisibly.
One critical reason fragmentation happens is due to merger and acquisition activity, which brings new systems and processes that pose challenges, and result in push-back against centralization. Additionally, fragmentation can accumulate as:
- Early teams tolerate it to move quickly
- Scaling teams multiply it under growth pressure
- Mature teams learn to live with it.
The result is duplication, rework, and delayed insights – all of which amounts to increased costs.
They standardize end-to-end processes and govern exceptions tightly, and introduce Global Process Owners (GPOs) whose responsibility it is to prevent fragmentation from happening. F&A Outsourcing is often used by them to enforce consistency in high-volume, repeatable activities, reducing variation at source.
Challenge 4: Optimizing Financial Close for Shared Services
The financial close target continues to be one of the most reliable indicators of Shared Services maturity. Across many Shared Services environments, manual reconciliations, spreadsheet-driven adjustments, and ad hoc workarounds remain common. These approaches may hold under normal conditions, but they become fragile when timelines compress, transaction volumes spike, or regulatory scrutiny increases. At that point, control gaps, unclear accountability, and process inconsistency are exposed.
The nature of financial close risk changes with organizational maturity:
- Early-stage Shared Services often rely on individual knowledge and discretionary effort to meet month-end, quarter-end, and year-end deadlines. The financial close “works,” but only because key people absorb complexity and risk.
- Scaling GBS organisations begin to feel strain as volumes increase and reporting timelines tighten. What was once manageable through effort becomes unsustainable, revealing gaps in standardization, documentation, and handoffs.
- Mature, global GBS operations face a different risk profile altogether. Speed expectations rise, regulatory and audit scrutiny intensifies, and governance becomes more complex. Without robust controls and clearly defined ownership, the close becomes vulnerable to compliance risk rather than simple delay.
In all cases, the financial close exposes whether Shared Services are operating as a system, or as a collection of heroic individual efforts.
High-performing GBS organizations treat the financial close as a continuous operational discipline, not a periodic event. Ownership is explicit, close activities are embedded into daily operations, and controls are designed to scale with volume and complexity.
Rather than relying on institutional memory or peak-period firefighting, they invest in process clarity, automation where it adds control (not just speed), and clear accountability across the close lifecycle. Trusted F&A Outsourcing Partners are often used to stabilize high-volume or specialist close activities, reducing dependency on individuals and increasing resilience during peak reporting periods.
Challenge 5: Technology Can Add to Operational Friction
Technology is often positioned as the solution to finance and accounting inefficiency. In practice, it can expose underlying process and capability gaps. As AI-based tools are implemented to solve immediate problems, adoption, configuration, and integration lags. Over time, Finance teams accumulate point solutions, workarounds, and bespoke customizations that reflect historical compromise rather than current operating needs.
The impact differs by maturity stage:
- Early-stage teams adopt tactical tools to meet immediate reporting or compliance demands, often without a scalable process foundation
- Scaling organizations layer new point solutions onto existing platforms, increasing handoffs, reconciliation effort, and system dependency
- Global brands rely on highly customised ERP and finance systems that deliver control, but at the cost of flexibility, speed, and ease of change.
They simplify before they innovate, building ‘data lakes’ (single source of truth) to unify disparate databases and ERP systems. F&A Outsourcing Partners are used to bring system expertise and process discipline where internal capability is stretched.
Challenge 6: Governance and Compliance Pressure
Finance Shared Services are central to compliance and data governance, and as Shared Services teams expand across jurisdictions and business models, governance becomes more complex, and less forgiving. Inconsistent execution and informal controls can introduce operational risk, and accountability blurs.
- In early-stage Finance teams, controls are manual and less robust.
- In scaling organizations, governance struggles to keep pace with complexity.
- For global brands, inconsistency creates enterprise-wide risk (e.g. non-compliance, poor financial health, and even organizational failure).
Global process ownership within the GBS organization allows for tighter controls as there is complete oversight of the end-to-end process, with governance embedded into the operating model. Finance and Accounting Outsourcing support provides controlled execution, clear audit trails, and consistent application of policies across regions.
Challenge 7: Scaling vs Complexity in Finance Teams
Growth has a habit of undoing good organizational design: new markets, new products, new teams, and increased volumes introduce variation faster than processes can absorb it. Processes designed for smaller volumes and/or regions, and less complex organizational structures, can bottleneck, leading to errors. Without interventions, Finance Shared Services drifts back to complexity.
- Early-stage teams: Reactive scaling decisions create fragility
- Acquired companies: Knowledge gaps and inconsistent execution appear as business grows
- Global brands: Complexity returns faster than it can be removed.
They design for elasticity: processes that can scale and maintain strong knowledge management. F&A Outsourcing provides flexible capacity that can expand or contract without permanently increasing cost or organizational complexity.
From Efficiency Engine to Strategic System with ADEC F&A Outsourcing
Across these challenges, a common theme emerges – Shared Services are being asked to deliver more, often without a corresponding shift in structure. Finance & Accounting Outsourcing helps rebalance that equation.
Used strategically, F&A Outsourcing allows organizations to stabilize and scale transactional activity, access specialist capability, and introduce flexibility into otherwise rigid operating models. For leading GBS organisations, outsourcing has become a way to protect the value of Shared Services while enabling Finance to meet modern expectations.
We provide comprehensive Finance and Accounting support, freeing your Finance teams to focus on value not volume.
Learn more about our capabilities and capacities or contact us to find out more about how we can help you with your Finance and Accounting outsourcing needs.
