Challenging Business Situation

Essays No.2

Describe how you have handled a difficult or challenging business situation

I started work as an accountant at Actavis Company in the remote 2001. After two year of accounting and reporting, I realized that I wanted to learn more about costing as well as planning and forecasting. Rather than just reporting what had happened, I wanted to have an impact on decisions that steer the business. This led me to the next position as a financial analyst for budgeting process.

With these new responsibilities and duties for me, my managers planned big changes in our present budgeting organization. From my previous job position, I knew that people like financial analysts and accountants made the most of work for forecasting and planning. That was not wrong but I thought that experts from other departments must be involved in this process. Finance department should only collect the data because they could leave out some information, which is significant for the business and could bring some additional or future expenses for the company. A month later, I had a conversation with the Finance manager and the Executive Director and I shared my opinion of budgeting process organization. However, this position helped me to handle in a difficult situation.

Usually our corporate financiers gave us a schedule for budgeting process for all company and manufacturing plants in the group. For my job, I had only a month for the preparation of many spreadsheets and slides with figures and comments. However, people said "Spoken word, thrown stone", and at that moment came an e-mail from the Executive Director: "Every department manager must be involved with opinion in budgeting process, must be prepared some calculations and must be ready to defend their figures. Nadya is your contact for questions." I was surprised. I had to train all the managers (10 people) about finances for a very short period (two weeks). My role was support and again support. I had to be as organized as possible but I knew that all my efforts would be waste if we could not introduce our results in the appropriate form.

I worked to fix main point of finance on assessable language for the participants in this challenging situation. Of course, managers were working hardly of calculations and comments, and finally all of them successfully were able to defend their departmental expense budget