Your finance function, run by ECT to agreed service levels.
Seven finance towers, from procure to pay to controllership, run from our Amman delivery centre under CPA review to agreed service levels, while decisions, approvals and releases stay with you.
New serviceSaudi clients · Amman deliveryFinance Function Outsourcing
Transactions, close, payroll, procure to pay, order to cash, compliance and planning are run by ECT from Amman under CPA supervision. Decisions, approvals and relationships stay with you, on your side of a written boundary. Scope is defined at activity level, the transition is gated rather than dated, and the service is governed like a shared service, with the framework written into the agreement.
It is built for three situations. New entities and foreign-investor subsidiaries that need a finance function before they have staff. Mid-market corporates and family businesses whose finance team grew one problem at a time and now close late, report in spreadsheets and audit slowly. And conglomerates or group shared services that want a partner to run a tower, an entity cluster or a transition wave under their own governance.
Jordan shares the Kingdom's working week, language and time zone, and one of the region's deepest accounting talent pools. The reviewers of your close are the people who run our IFRS 9, IAS 19 and IFRS 18 practices, so the technical matters most providers escalate are resolved inside the team. Physical needs, from bank documentation to auditor meetings, are covered by your engagement manager's scheduled visits to the client.
Three feed the ledger, three come out of it.
Transactions come in through procure to pay, order to cash and payroll, land in one ledger closed on one calendar, and go out as filings, financial statements and plans. Entities are scoped tower by tower, and most start with two or three.
The activity split, tower by tower.
Transactions, reconciliations and reporting move to ECT. Decisions, approvals and relationships stay with you. The bars show the typical share; the diagnostic confirms it activity by activity for each entity.
- General ledger and journals
- Accruals, prepayments, provisions
- Fixed asset register
- Bank, intercompany and sub-ledger reconciliations
- Month-end close to calendar
- Management pack and variances
- Accounting policy choices
- Non-routine judgements
- Approval of the close
- Board narrative
- Vendor master maintenance
- Requisition to purchase order
- Invoice receipt and three-way match
- Contract milestone tracking
- Payment run preparation
- Supplier statements and query desk
- Sourcing and tendering
- Contract award
- PO and payment approval under DoA
- Release of payments in the bank
- Customer master and credit files
- Billing and e-invoice issuance
- Cash application
- Receivables ageing and dunning
- Credit notes in the e-invoicing flow
- ECL data feed
- Credit policy and limits
- Pricing
- Key-account disputes
- Write-off decisions
- Monthly payroll calculation
- GOSI and WPS files
- Leave and end-of-service accruals
- Expense claims
- Final settlements
- Hiring and pay decisions
- Payroll approval before release
- Employee relations
- VAT return preparation
- Reconciliation to e-invoicing data
- Withholding tax computation
- Zakat working files
- Evidence file per filing
- Filing authorisation
- Contested tax positions
- Licensed advisor appointment
- Budget templates and consolidation
- Rolling forecast mechanics
- 13-week cash forecast
- Daily bank position
- Covenant tracking
- Variance analysis
- Targets and capital allocation
- Bank relationships and facilities
- Hedging and trade approvals
- Treasury policy
- IFRS financial statements
- Group reporting packs
- Audit file and auditor queries
- Technical accounting memos
- Regulatory returns
- Approval of financial statements
- Management representations
- Audit committee
- Auditor appointment
Six phases, each closed by a joint sign-off.
Your team keeps doing the work until ours has proven it can, and every step forward is signed by both sides. A first tower typically reaches steady state within a quarter; in a group, entities move in waves through the same six phases.
1Plan and diagnoseweeks 0 to 3 | 2Capture knowledgeweeks 3 to 8 | 3Transfer knowledgeweeks 8 to 10 | 4Ramp upweeks 10 to 12 | 5Hypercarethe first two closes | 6Steady stateongoing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What happens | We map every activity, its volumes, systems and controls, agree the split and the team, and record today's performance as the baseline. | Our accountants sit with yours, write the process maps and desktop procedures, and confirm controls and access. | Roles reverse: our team performs each procedure while yours observes and corrects. Each accountant is certified per procedure. | Volumes move to us in tranches with daily tracking. Anything outside tolerance stays with your team until fixed. | We run the full scope with extra reviewer cover, a daily huddle and one issue log. Service levels are measured, not yet enforced. | Service levels in force, monthly service report, governance cadence running, improvements logged and delivered. |
| What your team does | Give access to records and systems; name a process owner per tower. | Keep running the work; explain it; approve the documentation. | Observe, correct, sign the certification. | Hand over tranche by tranche; keep a fallback. | Attend the huddle; escalate anything that feels wrong. | Approve, release, review the monthly report. |
| Signed by both sides | Scope, activity split and baseline | Documentation approved | Team certified | Go-live | Stable: two closes on calendar | Annual review |
Read down each column: the phase, what happens in it, what we need from your team, and the gate both sides sign before the next phase starts.
Six things written into the service agreement.
An outsourced finance function is governed like a shared service. Targets and fees are set against your baseline; this is the framework they sit in.
ECT prepares. You approve and release.
Two everyday flows drawn across the two organisations. ECT staff never hold approval or release rights in your ERP, bank or government portals, and access is granted, logged and revoked by you. Every filing and every close carries an evidence file assembled as the work is done.
- New entities and subsidiaries of foreign investors that need a finance function before they have staff
- Mid-market corporates and family businesses professionalising a finance team that grew one problem at a time
- Conglomerates and group shared services that need capacity for a tower, an entity cluster or a transition wave
- Groups with many entities that want one close calendar, one chart of accounts and one policy set
- Entities between finance managers, or with records that need stabilising before anything is outsourced
The technicality behind Finance Function Outsourcing.
Straight answers to the questions finance teams, auditors and boards ask us most often.
How is this different from the accounting outsourcing other firms offer?
Scope is defined at activity level with a written split of what we run and what you retain, tower by tower. Transition is gated rather than dated: work moves when both sides sign that a phase is complete. And the reviewers of your close are the people who run our IFRS 9, IAS 19 and IFRS 18 practices, so technical matters are resolved inside the team rather than escalated to a separate engagement.
Who is legally responsible for filings and financial statements?
You are. The taxable person remains responsible under ZATCA regulations and management remains responsible for the financial statements. We prepare, reconcile and submit under your authorisation, with CPA review before every submission, and the service responsibility matrix records this activity by activity. Government portals authenticate individuals through Nafath, so your named user submits; we never hold portal credentials.
Is our data secure, and does the arrangement comply with the Personal Data Protection Law?
Your data stays in your own systems. We work inside your ERP with preparer access only, and in your bank and government portals only through users you control and can revoke. Employee and payroll data handled from Amman is a cross-border transfer under the PDPL, so a data processing agreement with the standard transfer clauses forms part of every engagement, access is individual, logged and recertified quarterly, and nothing is stored on local drives.
Our records are behind and reconciliations are unreliable. Can you take this on?
Yes, as a stabilisation engagement first: fixed scope, fixed fee, time-boxed. The outsourcing service then starts from a reconciled position. Starting it on unreliable balances would only make the problem cheaper to run.
How are service levels and fees set?
Against your baseline. The diagnostic captures how the function performs today; service levels are drafted from that, refined through hypercare and then fixed. The fee basis is a fixed monthly amount per entity per tower on a volume band, reviewed annually, with change control for scope additions and capped service credits that can be earned back. The persistent-failure remedy is written into the agreement at onboarding.
We have a shared-services centre. How do you fit in?
Under the hybrid model. We take the towers, entity cluster or transition wave you assign, work inside your taxonomy and systems, and report against the same service levels as your in-house teams under one responsibility matrix and one process owner per tower.
Which systems do you work with?
Yours. Your ERP remains the system of record and invoices are issued from your ZATCA-compliant e-invoicing system. We operate SAP Business One, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Odoo, Zoho Books, QuickBooks Online and Xero, and legacy systems where required. We bring the ticketing, query log and document intake per entity, and a virtual desktop where a client prefers no data on laptops.
What if we later build the function in-house?
Process maps, desktop procedures and the compliance calendar are yours throughout. At transfer we help recruit, train the hires against the procedures, ramp down in reverse and certify readiness before stepping back. Build-operate-transfer is one of the four delivery models, and the exit is designed into the other three.
Finance Function Outsourcing in practice.
How this service played out on a real engagement, with the figures the client signed off.
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