Only two percent of finance teams consider themselves fully optimised, and half of finance teams still take more than five business days to close the books, meaning leadership is routinely working from information that is already out of date by the time it reaches them (FP&A Trends Survey, 2025; Ledge, 2025). This is not a case of weak effort. Most finance functions are still built for a business environment that no longer exists, and the usual responses, more headcount, more software, more hours, have not closed the gap.
At the same time, the mandate on finance has expanded. CFOs increasingly describe their role as strategic rather than purely custodial, shaping company direction rather than reporting on it after the fact. The operating capacity to fulfil that expanded mandate has not grown at the same pace.
Why the obvious fixes have not worked
Automation applied to a poorly structured process produces a faster version of the same problem rather than freeing time for analysis. Most CFOs have automated some part of their workflow. Few report meaningful time savings from it, because the underlying division of work, who does what, and why, has not changed.
Headcount is a harder constraint than most South African finance leaders are budgeting for. Accounting and finance sit among the country’s most constrained skill categories, and globally, 60 percent of finance leaders say hiring finance and accounting staff is harder now than in previous years, with 41 percent reporting roles taking three to six months to fill (CFO Brew, 2026). Adding headcount assumes the market will supply the right people quickly. In this market, it will not.
The skills gap also sits in an unexpected place. It is not a shortage of accounting qualification. It is the absence of people who combine financial fluency with the technical and analytical capability the function now needs, a structural mismatch that a single training course will not fix.
What higher-performing finance functions do differently
The finance functions that have closed the gap between reporting and strategic contribution made one structural choice: they separated transactional, compliance-driven work from advisory work at the operating model level, rather than asking one generalist team to switch between both. Deloitte’s 2026 CFO Signals survey found that freeing staff for higher-value work through automation was the most cited talent priority for 2026, named by 49 percent of CFOs, ahead of AI adoption itself.
In practice, that means reallocating work rather than simply adding to it. Routine cyclical work, reconciliation, month-end close, statutory reporting, moves to specialist external capacity, because it is process-driven and does not require deep organisational context. Internal finance leadership is redirected toward forecasting, cost strategy, and board-level counsel, work that depends on judgement about the specific business and cannot be outsourced. And the calibre of the specialist capacity matters: a managed arrangement staffed by qualified chartered accountants is what lets an internal team hand off work with confidence, rather than simply relocating the anxiety.
How AFA addresses this
Flexible Resourcing answers the hiring constraint directly. Rather than running a three-to-six-month recruitment cycle against a shrinking pool of qualified candidates, a finance leader gains access to AFA’s bench of more than 250 professionals, the majority chartered accountants CA(SA), for a defined period or scope.
Outsourcing answers the structural problem, not just the staffing one. Entire categories of transactional work, reconciliation, financial reporting, payroll, financial statement preparation, move to a managed service under AFA. The internal function is not stretched thinner. It is redesigned: the work that required no organisational context leaves the building, and the people who remain spend their time on forecasting, cost strategy, and advising leadership.
AFA’s Level 1 B-BBEE status and 100% black ownership are relevant here too. For many JSE-listed entities and their supply chains, B-BBEE contribution level is a requirement of finance partner selection, not a preference, and is worth raising early in any evaluation.
The question worth asking
The useful diagnostic is not whether your finance team is busy. Every finance team is busy. It is narrower: of the work sitting inside your internal function, how much requires context about this specific business, and how much is process work done internally out of habit rather than necessity.
If that question has not been answered yet, it is worth a conversation about where AFA’s Flexible Resourcing or Outsourcing services fit against the current operating model, before the next reporting cycle answers it for you.
