Welcome to MSFT Finance Blog.  On this blog, you will find details about MSFT Finance such as information about our organization, our rhythm, our challenges, how we leverage technology, etc.  Given this is a social networking site, this is an informal MSFT Finance blog that will offer an inside view of finance and MSFT and hope it will start some good discussions and learnings from each other.
 
For the first blog, I would like to focus on an overview of MSFT Finance.  We have approx 2,500 Finance employees located Worldwide (roughly 3% of total headcount) in a variety of roles.  Some functions that are included in MSFT Finance include Business Analysis and Reporting, Tax, Audit, Treasury, Corporate Development, Corporate Planning and Analysis, Accounting, Investor Relations,  Procurement and Real Estate and Facilities.  We have finance professionals located in over 85 countries worldwide. 
 
Our business model is quite complex.  There are not many other companies in the world that spend roughly $7B annually in R&D, targeting both consumers and businesses, sell direct and through partners, sell software, host solutions, offer services and sell some hardware as well as have such a diversified product portfolio as we do.  We have three business divisions which include Entertainment and Devices (ie Mobility Communications, Xbox, Hardware, Games, Zune), Business Division (Office, MS Dynamics) and Platform & Services (Server, Client, Online Services Group).  MSFT Finance plays a critical role to ensure we make the right decisions to help drive the business forward and drive shareholder value.
 
Let me now go a little deeper into the finance organization.  There are four things that I think are important for a successful finance organization which include great people, the ability to provide business insight that drives shareholder value, solid finance and business excellence and finally use of technology.  I think MSFT Finance has made some great strides over the past few years in many of these areas.  However, as with any company it is a journey and there are a few areas I think we can do a lot more to drive more shareholder value.  
 
First, it is about the people.  We are able to attract very bright industry hires, MBAs and college hires.  Some drivers include job responsibilities, career opportunities inside and outside of finance, development programs such as what we launched last year called Finance Academy to help train and develop our finance organization and so on.  From a career opportunity standpoint, many of our finance employees have done rotations internationally.  With that said, we are on a journey and in my opinion we have some work to do on systematic on-boarding and training and a few other areas. 
 
Second, it is around the ability to drive business insight and shareholder value.  Finance is involved in developing the overall MSFT strategy, business development, ROI decisions and redeployments, P&L management and so on.  We have a strong investor relations team which is essential in a company the size of MSFT.  In addition, you will not be successful in the business insight space if you do not have a solid partnership with the business.  That is, finance has to be at the table and heard when it comes to making significant business decisions.  To ensure solid business partnership, the finance support for the COO and the Business Divisions (which represent approx 50% of the finance organization) reports directly into the business with a strong dotted line into the CFO. 
 
Third, it is about finance and business excellence.  This includes not only controls and compliance, SOX, accounting and reporting, but also ensuring we have a solid business rhythm and a common finance framework.  Regarding business rhythm, finance plays a key role with driving our annual business strategy reviews; our mid-year review process for the Sales, Marketing and Services Organization; our Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Processes and so on.  Regarding a common finance framework, Chris Liddell (MSFT CFO) launched what is called Finance 3,0 which is a common framework for finance with the focus to get all 2,500 finance employees working around the same goals and ultimately driving shareholder value. 
 
Finally, leveraging technology is essential to drive efficiency and productivity as well as retain your strong finance employees.  It is super important that we in finance continue the right investments to move the finance organization forward and focus more time on analysis and making key decisions vs. reporting and data integrity.  Given we are MSFT, we leverage our technology for reporting, scorecarding, forecasting and planning, tracking revenue, expenses and headcount and so on.  Today we leverage SQL for our reporting engine on top of SAP, we also heavily use SharePoint and Office.  In addition, we will be using Performance Point (one of our products in our business intelligence suite offering) to support MSFT forecasting process as well as scorecards for the business.  In addition, we are working with the Microsoft Dynamics team on developing a commercially viable product that we will use for our procurement activities. 
 
My goal of this blog was to give you an overview of the Finance organization at MSFT from my point of view.  For the next blog, I will pick an area such as Treasury or Planning, discuss our approach, our rhythm, role of finance and how we leverage technology in the particular area.  Please let me know if you have any questions and look forward to further discussions and learning from others in the Finance Profession.

Byron Rader, Finance Director
Microsoft Corporation