In this podcast Meg speaks with Michelle Wall, Director of Finance. They discuss how we deliver value through efficient use of resources. This is the final podcast in a six part series, each one discussing our strategic goals.   Transcript   Megan Hayward: Hello and welcome to another episode from Companies House. We have recently launched our new 5-year strategy, and one of our strategic goals is about how we deliver value through efficient use of resources. So, I'm here today with Michelle Wall, Director of Finance at Companies House. And today Michelle is going to give us a bit of an insight into her work and how that work runs through, who we are and what we do. So, hi Michelle, how are you?     Michelle Wall: I'm very good. Megan, how are you?     MH: Yes, I'm well, thank you. I'm just going to jump in straight away with the first question. I know how busy you are! So could you please tell me a little bit about your role and how it contributes to us as an organisation?    MW: Okay, so I'm the Director of Finance and Commercial and I cover 4 areas in terms of activity. So financial transactions, that’s the money coming in and the money going out, so what people generally think of as the finance team. All that purchasing, order processing and payroll activity.     I've got a strategic finance and business partnering team. They’re a new team, and they’re delivering, what I call the looking up and looking out. So they're looking forward, they’re supporting the business, understanding our strategic finance needs – have we got the money that we need, when we need it? And if we haven't, putting those plans in action to make sure we get that sorted.     I've got a commercial team. They cover sort of procurement and buying third-party contract, supporting the business through the contract management and the life of those contracts. I also have some responsibility for risk management and assurance. So alongside all of that, making sure that we're understanding our risks and making sure that all our governance processes are delivering the activity that they need to. I'm also Exec Champion for equality, diversity and inclusion. And that's something I'm very passionate about.    MH: Well, that's quite a breadth of things there. The one I found most interesting was sort of the horizon scanning team.     MW: Yeah.     MH: You sort of mentioned it at the beginning. Like, for me, I wouldn't even know that that's something that we would be doing at Companies House. So that's really interesting.     MW: So that is a new piece of activity and became even more of a focus for us. We used to be what's called a trading fund and even though we were a government organisation and civil servants, we were financially independent. Due to a decision at the centre, we lost our trading fund status in April last year. And as a consequence, we now need to do, we’re part of the vote funding system, we’re part of the spending reviews, and that's activity that we didn't do before. So we need to be able to demonstrate that we've got really good plans in that place to make sure that our spending requests are acknowledged and people give us money for it. So that's a new team with a much more structured focus in ensuring what we're doing.     It's also supporting the activity for the new strategy, one of the reasons that we're here today. In terms of ensuring that all that new activity that we're doing and the way that we're changing is financially sustainable.     MH: Thank you. So how do we make sure that we have the right resources when we need them? And that they are operated efficiently?   MW: I could do a very short answer and just say plan, plan, plan! We recognize that we've published a very ambitious strategy and vision for the future for Companies House. And that's given us a really good understanding of exactly what we're going to need in terms of resources. But I think resources, when people talk about resources, they forget that resourc