Group Finance Director Paul Schroder tells Ensemble how the Finance Team have pulled out all the stops to ensure that the business continues to operate during the Covid-19 crisis.

It has been an incredibly busy year so for the Group finance team.

In January we closed the 2019 financial year end at the same time as going live with a new finance system, a project which enables all group companies to work off the same platform for the first time.

In February our auditors (EY) started a very detailed and painstaking external audit process which lasted until 16 March when audit process was completed, pleasingly with a clean bill of health for the Group.

Before the ink had dried on the audit report the UK went into COVID-19 lockdown the following week and the status quo went out the door. Since lockdown we have delivered a COVID-19 re-forecast (known as F1) which looked to re-forecast 2020 for the impacts of COVID-19 and in particular identifying cash requirements of the Group to allow us to manage our way through this with as little disruptions as possible as well as to generate financial support from our shareholders.

At the same time as the F1 we developed a brand new 12 week cashflow reporting process that sees us delivering detailed cashflow updates and analysis to the Board on a weekly basis to enable informed decision making.

More recently we delivered an extensive 5 year re-forecast for HSBC as we look to take advantage of the Government’s Coronavirus large business interruption loan scheme. Many hours of work went into adapting and modifying existing reporting templates and reviewing the outputs in order to deliver the information that HSBC required in order to assess our application.

Through all of this, business as usual still had to continue as normal and we continued to deliver the monthly management accounts on time, prepared models for potential opportunities, such as the Theatre Royal Sydney and completed a process to change support partners for the finance system.

Like every team we have had to adapt our working approach to mitigate the impacts of the new remote working environment and reduced teams due to furlough and it’s a real credit to everyone in finance right across the Group that we have been able to continue to deliver a high quality service under significant and continued levels of pressure.