How finance teams can become better cross-functional partners in 2022

No matter the size of your business, learning how to work cross-functionally is essential to having success. Whether you’re a 3-person team or a mid-market business with hundreds of employees, maximizing and optimizing your working relationships with other teams can make a significant impact.

This is especially true if you’re a finance leader responsible for determining how resources get allocated across your organization to drive growth.

A new era of cross-collaboration

It’s hard to overstate how crucial it is for finance leaders to work collaboratively across their organizations. But one could argue that no period taught them more about how essential this alignment is than 2020-2021. Bringing unprecedented changes and challenges, these past two years emphasized how necessary it is to strategize, plan, and collaborate across your organization in order to drive steady growth and foster a culture of trust and transparency.

In a way, the acceptance of cross-collaboration as an essential work strategy was a necessary evolution. Siloed work can be inevitable at times, but leaning on it as a mark of company culture can have negative effects. When companies develop a ‘heads down at all times’ culture, it can be virtually impossible for finance leaders or teams to know what others are working on.

Keeping teams privy to what others are working on keeps everyone in the loop and fosters collaboration and can inspire creative thinking and innovative solutions. In short, when individuals work together as a team, regardless of their department or roles, it opens up avenues for transparency and support.

The role of Finance teams within the scope of company growth

But when it comes to Finance teams, the importance of cross-collaborative work increases tenfold. These teams, in a lot of ways, are the current that keeps businesses alive, so it’s important for them to lean heavily into departments to figure out the best ways to help with ongoing projects or goals.

When Finance team leaders purposefully structure finance teams for collaboration, departments across the organization can reliably glean guidance and insight from the unique perspectives they have into the business. This is because, arguably, the Finance team knows the most granular ins-and-outs of the business.

Whether it's forecasting, payroll, or any other accounting-related task, Finance teams are in the unique position of having a perspective into the present and future needs of the business. So as a finance lead, take a step back and think about all of the ways you can lean on this insight to support other teams in your organization.

Can you help the Marketing leads develop a big-picture narrative surrounding company growth? Can you work cross-collaboratively with Sales leads to ensure that they’re hitting their goals? Or can you work with your IT or Infrastructure leads to ensure that they're set up for success with their SaaS contracts? There are a multitude of ways to play a pivotal part in the growth of your company as a finance lead, but establishing those lines of communication and trust are imperative.

How Ramp breaks down silos between finance and other teams

Finance teams often struggle to collaborate effectively with other departments, creating bottlenecks that slow down business growth. When expense reports pile up in email threads, purchase requests get lost in Slack messages, and budget visibility remains locked in spreadsheets only finance can access, your entire organization suffers from delayed decisions and missed opportunities.

Ramp transforms cross-functional collaboration by giving every team member controlled access to the financial tools they need. With Ramp's role-based permissions, you can grant marketing managers visibility into their campaign budgets without exposing payroll data, or let department heads approve expenses within preset limits while maintaining oversight. This shared visibility eliminates the constant back-and-forth that typically bogs down finance teams.

The platform's automated expense management features further streamline collaboration by removing manual touchpoints between teams. When employees submit expenses through Ramp, the system automatically categorizes transactions, matches receipts, and routes approvals based on your configured workflows. Your sales team no longer needs to chase down finance for reimbursements, and your finance team doesn't waste hours sorting through expense reports. Real-time notifications keep everyone informed of approval status, budget utilization, and policy violations as they happen.

Ramp's integrated procurement capabilities also unite teams around a single source of truth for vendor management and spending. Department heads can submit purchase requests directly in Ramp, where finance can review, approve, and issue virtual cards with built-in spending controls. This centralized approach gives finance the control they need while empowering other teams to move quickly on critical purchases. By replacing disconnected tools and manual processes with Ramp's unified platform, finance teams can shift from being perceived as blockers to becoming strategic partners in driving business growth.

How to support your cross-functional leaders in 2022

Strong finance partnerships start with understanding what each department actually needs. At Ramp, we've seen firsthand how finance teams become true strategic partners when they focus on solving real problems for their colleagues.

Take our partnership with Marketing. They need predictive insights, not just historical reports. By shifting from backward-looking analysis to forward-looking forecasts, finance helps marketing teams make smarter budget decisions before campaigns launch.

Sales teams face different challenges. They're moving fast and need finance to keep pace. Quick approvals on compensation changes, real-time quota adjustments, and streamlined commission calculations keep sales momentum going. The best finance-sales relationships feel less like a checkpoint and more like having a co-pilot.

For People Operations, the partnership centers on scaling smartly. With payroll eating up most budgets, finance and People Ops must work hand-in-hand on headcount planning, compensation benchmarking, and policy costs. The key? Building flexible models that adapt as quickly as your company grows.

Even technical teams benefit from stronger finance partnerships. Infrastructure teams managing dozens of vendor relationships need help optimizing contracts and payment terms. Simple improvements like better invoice tracking and clearer payment timelines can save engineering hours for actual engineering work.

The common thread? Finance teams that succeed in supporting cross-functional leaders share three traits: they communicate proactively, they build processes that scale, and they focus on enabling other teams rather than gatekeeping. When finance becomes a true partner instead of just a service provider, the entire organization moves faster.