Get the plumbing right
Everyone hates friction, especially needless friction. Our scientists should be designing, running and analyzing experiments. Our clinicians should be designing protocols, talking with KOLs, reviewing trial data, analyzing competitor molecules, and communicating with regulators. They should not waste time filling out Excel expense reports, looking for contracts to validate a vendor invoice, or wading through CRO accruals at quarter-end. For executives, have you puzzled through an MFA doom-loop while on a plane, or on vacation? How much time a week does your executive team spend on validating expenses - or do they just click “Approve All”?
The appropriate controls and segregation of duties is unique to each company, and should reflect available resources, staffing, mid-term corporate goals and risk tolerance. Some are easy to implement and provide significant benefit at low cost. For example, dual-administrator controls should be standard for anything which touches money. Similarly, a separate “preparer” and “approver” is a good base case, and a second approver and a payor can be added as apprpriate. Confirmation of vendor payment information, and tying out invoices to an executed contract, is an easy fraud prevention technique. Cloud-based file servers can be configured as the Wild West, CIO lockdown, or somewhere in between (which is generally the right answer). Do you need elaborate cybersecurity protocols to protect customer financial data? If you don’t have customers, this is probably less important.
Finance (and adjacent functions like IT) only exist to further the development of pipeline programs. Taking an idea to an IND, through clinical trials, and to regulatory approval is very hard! Finance should do everything possible to make it easier for these things to happen, while appropriately protecting the company.
Circling back to the title of this post, you only notice the plumbing when it goes awry. If you make the finance function frictionless, and enable your discovery, research and development colleagues to do their jobs better, then it is a job well done.