CoverStory
Raising the roof
Farha Jamadar FMAAT is overhauling a dated finance system, while also winning over sceptical colleagues
Words: Annie Makoff Photography: Richard Gleed
Project casebook
Company data
Revenue (for year ending 30 June 2025)
Number of staff
Finance headcount
The challenge
To stabilise a fragile finance function following the sudden resignation of a long-standing senior employee and maintain business continuity. Lay groundwork for automation and financial transformation.
Approach
Reviewed and analysed current processes and identified inefficient legacy systems, brought payroll back in-house and started the journey of embedding a ‘best practice’ mindset across the team, while laying groundwork for automation.
When Farha Jamadar FMAAT ACMA CGMA became finance manager at Skyline Roofing Centres in 2025, the department had been significantly affected by the sudden loss of a long-standing senior employee and there was a high risk of business disruption.
For Jamadar, it was a case of rolling up her sleeves and getting on with the job: stabilising the department and maintaining business continuity. But it also meant unpicking every process, digging deeply into the accounts and analysing the figures. She had to be liberal with questioning:
- ‘Why is it done this way?’
- ‘Where do these figures come from?’
- ‘Why is this process not carried out more regularly?’
- ‘Why are these costs so high this month?’
Accountants are expected to apply curiosity and professional scepticism to their work, and this is precisely the approach Jamadar took. After all, how can you instigate improvements if you don’t understand what you are trying to improve?
Lofty aims and overcoming obstacles
Jamadar’s main aim was to completely shake up the inner workings and operations of the finance function through automation, collaboration and joined-up thinking. She was determined to rip apart the management accounts and start from the beginning with smarter, more agile ways of working. Not only would this make everyone’s lives easier, but monthly accounts presented to the board would be accurate, reliable and insightful.
Jamadar had achieved a similar transformation in her previous role as head of finance at Todd Doors. She had overhauled the finance function, implementing best practice across every system and process. By the time she left, the finance department she had nurtured for 17 years was a streamlined, data-driven function with automated processes providing reliable, insightful data.
Jamadar initially had similar aims at her new role, but it quickly became clear that her initial roadmap on how to achieve this financial utopia would have to be revised.
“There are a lot of underlying obstacles that I’m dealing with,” she says. “Trying to persuade people who have been here for years and years that they need to work differently and trying to bring them on the path with me, while navigating existing company culture, is a bit of a challenge. To top all that, I’m a woman from an Asian background in a male-dominated industry, coming in saying ‘we need to do things differently, there are better ways of doing it’. It adds another layer to the mix.”
The senior leadership team – predominantly white, middle-class men – are “very supportive” of Jamadar’s plans, but her own team have been somewhat hesitant. “I thought there would be a degree of commonality in the team because a lot of them are the same ethnicity as myself, so the trust would be there,” she says. “But maybe being a woman is an even bigger divide.”
She is conscious, too, of the “completely understandable” defensive element at play: any newcomer joining a team wanting to make big changes is always going to make people naturally suspicious and worried about their jobs.
RESULTS
• Reduced reliance on single-person processes by documenting and standardising core finance workflows.
• Around 75% improvement in frequency of bank reconciliations (monthly to weekly) to improve confidence in cash flow.
• Improved resilience of month-end and day-to-day finance delivery by ensuring continuity and reliability of management accounts.
• Improved audit readiness through tighter controls, clearer reconciliations and improved data traceability.
• Shifted team mindset from ‘that’s how it’s always been done’ to adaptability/agile mindset.
I’m nosey, I love digging around and finding out the ‘why’.
Image: Richard Gleed
Tackling bias
But Jamadar is completely unfazed. “I’m a football coach to 14-year-olds in my spare time and I don’t even like football,” she says. “But it’s given me a thick skin. You can see me with my kit every Sunday and Wednesday afternoon screaming, ‘Offside!’ It’s about breaking those stereotypes and getting on with the job.”
So when it comes to unconscious bias, she is completely direct with her team. “I lean into it,” she reveals. “It’s not something I’m going to shy away from. Yes, I’m a woman. So what? But what they really need to hear is how I’m going to make their lives easier. And I will. I know finance, I know my numbers – that’s my USP as a woman in construction.”
So what, in Jamadar’s view, needs to change within the finance function? “There’s excessive manual effort, poor process design and antiquated reporting processes,” she explains. In addition, several departments are also hyper-focused on meeting deliverables and they seem to work in silos.
“They just aren’t collaborating,” says Jamadar. “One department will do something and it’ll be completely replicated in another department. There’s also a lot of unnecessary manual formatting and re-formatting.”
Being hyper-focused on metrics and deliverables also means there is little time for questioning or checking. As Jamadar observes, it can feel blinkered. “There’s almost a robotic approach here,” she says. “It’s very ‘invoice, process, next!’ I’m often thinking, ‘Hang on, why aren’t we stopping to question why that invoice is lower than that one? Or why does that sales order look unusually high? And what are we doing with all this data? How are we using it?’”
We are the financial gatekeepers of information ...It’s key in making business decisions. So when we provide data, we need to be happy and confident that everything is robust and accurate.
Image: Richard Gleed
Seeing the bigger picture
The 13 members Jamadar manages are split across the London office and an offshore India team. There is a sense that staff are entirely focused on specific tasks but without looking at the wider picture or being ‘inquisitive’ and questioning enough.
“The focus is just on getting the job completed, but there is no healthy scepticism,” Jamadar says. “I’m nosey, I love digging around and finding out the ‘why’. I’d much rather have someone screaming at me every single day because they are discovering inaccuracies than people blindly following instructions and not checking the data. It can’t be left entirely up to me to spot these things.”
Jamadar has recently redeveloped her financial transformation roadmap, which she has shared with the leadership team. It is a slower process than she would have liked, but this version recognises the need for smaller, incremental changes to build trust and confidence first.
The roadmap focuses on stabilisation, control and efficiency, improved insight and, crucially, reframing expectations from ‘cost-cutting’ to ‘sustainable finance’.
It’s a “realistic path” to future efficiency savings by aligning finance delivery, audit, banking and business growth, Jamadar explains.
And things are improving. As the small changes she has introduced start to benefit the team, trust in her is growing.
So far, Jamadar has introduced weekly bank reconciliation in place of monthly reconciliations, which reduces the risk of undetected cash errors or timing issues. She has encouraged earlier deadlines for monthly management accounts to buy time to rebuild reliable and accurate month-end processes. She has also brought payroll back in-house to improve control over data, costs and reporting. And her newly revised roadmap to implement larger changes such as a Business Central platform – a streamlined, automated system that improves data accuracy and reduces reliance on operational bottlenecks and human error, and provides the board with real data with transparency that allows easier improvements and transformation.
Determination
Jamadar is determined to instil best practice across the entire team, albeit at their own pace – the idea of questioning data, of being curious, of collaborating with other departments if there’s an anomaly or if bank reconciliations don’t match. Ultimately, everyone will instinctively know what ‘good’ looks like.
It will take time, she says, but it’s going to happen. “We are the financial gatekeepers of information,” she adds. “It’s key in making business decisions. So when we provide data, we need to be happy and confident that everything is robust and accurate. I’m building something we can all be proud of.”
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Raising the roof
Farha Jamadar FMAAT is overhauling a dated finance system, while also winning over sceptical colleagues
Words: Annie Makoff Photography: Richard Gleed
