Lauri Loikkanen

Finance, Controlling & Development

Make finance work for your business.

Financial controlling

Make reporting more reliable, efficient and useful.

Support in developing closing, management reporting, consolidation, controls and other financial controlling processes — from identifying bottlenecks to designing practical ways of working.

Finance development

Build finance processes that work as the business grows.

Practical support for finance process development, systems, automation and operating models. From reviewing the current setup to designing and implementing better ways of working.

Forecasting & performance

Turn financial information into better business decisions.

Development and sparring around budgeting, forecasting, profitability, KPIs and management reporting, with a focus on making financial information genuinely useful for running the business.

Training & sparring

Strengthen financial thinking and capabilities.

Tailored training and sparring for finance professionals, teams and business leaders in areas such as controlling, reporting, forecasting, accounting and finance development.

From accounting detail to business decisions.

I’m Lauri Loikkanen, a finance professional with more than ten years of experience across accounting, controlling, FP&A, international group finance and finance-function development.

My experience ranges from hands-on accounting and statutory reporting to group reporting, forecasting, finance systems, commercial analysis and leading finance operations. I’m particularly interested in making finance more efficient, scalable and useful for business decisions.

MSc Accounting · KLT · TNT · International finance

Short notes on finance, controlling and better ways of working.

  • If a number doesn’t lead to action, it has little value

    Finance produces plenty of reports. But producing a report and helping someone run a business are two different things. A traditional financial report is very good at telling what has already happened. Revenue decreased, costs increased, margin was below target. The obvious question is: so what? When looking at financial reporting, I tend to come…

  • Automate or simplify first?

    Finance processes often accumulate work gradually. A new report is requested. Another control is added. Someone builds an Excel file to bridge two systems. A reconciliation is introduced after a problem. A manual adjustment becomes part of the monthly routine. Individually, each addition can make perfect sense. Years later, the process may contain dozens of…

  • A faster monthly close isn’t really about speed.

    When companies talk about improving the monthly close, the discussion often starts with the number of days it takes to produce the results. But speed itself isn’t particularly valuable. What matters is how quickly the business can get financial information that is reliable enough to make decisions. In my experience, a slow close is rarely…

  • Your forecast will be wrong. That’s not the problem.

    A forecast is almost guaranteed to be wrong. Revenue will develop differently than expected. Recruitment plans will change. Costs will move between months. A customer decision will be delayed, a project will start earlier, or something completely unexpected will happen. That doesn’t make the forecast unsuccessful. A forecast is created using the best information available…