I joined a new emerging markets business unit at its start, with no finance infrastructure, processes or team in place. Few finance leaders get to start from nothing, and it teaches you what really matters. If I did it again, this is the order I would follow.
1. Agree what the business needs to know
Before any system or template, ask the general manager which decisions finance must support. In a distributor portfolio that meant profitability by market, customer and brand, and clear visibility of trade spend and inventory. The answers drive everything that follows.
2. Design the structure
Next come the foundations: the chart of accounts, cost centres and reporting hierarchies. These feel technical, but they decide what you can report for years. Getting them right before system configuration is much cheaper than fixing them later.
3. Set up controls early
Bring in compliance from the start. An approvals framework and clear close routines are easy to build into a new process, and painful to add once people have developed their own habits.
4. Create the rhythm
A business runs on its calendar. Set the month-end cadence, the performance review, and the budget and forecast cycles, and keep to them. Consistency builds trust faster than any single report.
5. Automate as you go
Begin with simple templates and move to dashboards once the data flows are stable. Standardising first means you automate a good process, not a messy one.
6. Build the team around partnering
Hire and coach people who enjoy the business as much as the numbers. A new function has a rare chance to make business partnering the norm from the first day.
The biggest lesson is that a finance function is mostly a set of agreements: on definitions, ownership, timing and standards. Systems record those agreements, so it pays to make them carefully.