Driving Financial Agility: How Jaguar Land Rover Transformed Its Finance Operations

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), one of the world's most iconic automotive businesses, operates on a massive global scale. With 28 legal entities across 22 countries and over 1,000 finance employees, the company faced a fragmented and highly complex accounting operation. JLR sought a solution to manage its lengthy close process and eliminate thousands of manual tasks.

By embracing FloQast, JLR has not only gained unprecedented visibility into its financial operations but also established a streamlined foundation that empowers the finance team to influence the business proactively.

Navigating Global Scale and Complexity

Before FloQast, JLR’s finance team faced significant regional silos and manual processes, making effective change management crucial. Technology enabled greater visibility, but it was the team’s growth mindset and commitment to driving change that transformed how things were done. Achieving consistency across five regions required new tools and a willingness to challenge the old ways of working.

Michael Mills, Director of Finance Operations at JLR, inherited a grueling 15-day close. The team was processing up to 2,000 manual journal entries every quarter, each requiring manual input, review, and verification. This lag meant that by the time finance synthesised the data, the window for the business to act on it had already closed.

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"We just had a real lack of transparency, a real lack of visibility on what on earth was going on. We were doing over 1,500 manual journals. Actually, it was closer to 2,000 manual journals on a quarter-end. So again, just think about every one of those requires manual input, manual reviews, manual checks."

— Michael Mills, Director of Finance Operations

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Shining a Light on Fragmented Processes

For Michael and the finance team, achieving true visibility was as much about effective change management and adopting a growth mindset as it was about technology. FloQast provided the tools, but it was the willingness to challenge old habits and drive cultural change that made progress possible.

Instead of deploying complex and rigid automations right away, JLR used FloQast to examine, challenge, and simplify their existing workflows. The goal was to master the foundational activities first.

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"You can't fight what you can't see. So first you get the transparency, really have a better understanding of what is in front of you. FloQast is helping us to see the wood for the trees, actually see what was happening, and then to us go tackle it."

— Michael Mills, Director of Finance Operations

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Turning Hours into Minutes

With clear visibility established, JLR began uncovering massive inefficiencies. One of the most striking examples was a daily cash reconciliation task handled by an offshore shared service team in India.

Previously, an accountant would download a PDF from the bank and spend six to eight hours manually ticking and tying line items. By standardising and optimising this process through their new workflows, JLR drastically reduced the time required.

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"Rather than spending six to eight hours, they were spending five to 10 minutes on one or two of the exceptions and basically giving it the oversight."

— Michael Mills, Director of Finance Operations

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By applying this mindset of "progress over perfection" across the department, JLR achieved significant, measurable results:

• Drastic Time Savings: Daily cash reconciliation time plummeted from up to 8 hours to under 10 minutes.
• Elimination of Busywork: Hundreds of manual journal entries were eliminated entirely once the team had the visibility to see they added no value.
• Faster Close Cycle: The team is actively executing a roadmap to reduce their 15-day close down to a highly efficient three-day close.
• Stronger Controls: The finance organisation established much more strength and rigidity within its control framework.

A New Era of Strategic Finance

Today, JLR’s progress is driven as much by effective change management and a growth mindset as by technology. FloQast provided the transparency and efficiency needed, but it was the finance team's active commitment to change and continual improvement that made real transformation possible.

By freeing up thousands of hours previously lost to manual ticking and tying, JLR's finance team now delivers results when the business can still act on them.

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"Our vision of finance has a dual role. It's there to firstly protect the value within the business, and then to grow value. If you spend too much time on protecting value rather than growing value, then actually finance will remain a back office. We want to find time and resources and liberate personnel so they can do the influencing. They can do the storytelling. They can really drive the business forward."

— Michael Mills, Director of Finance Operations

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