This year’s winner of the Finance Team of the Year, The Society of St Vincent de Paul, put forward an entry that reflected all of the dramatically increase workload and innovation that every finance team in every charity experienced in 2020. The pace of change and the demands made by the requirements for good governance and financial management, especially in a time of organisational crisis where existential budgeting and rebudgeting / forecasting and re-forecasting was the norm – placing huge pressure on all our finance teams.  The Society of St Vincent de Paul had come through the initiation of the largest and most complex of financial consolidations on the island of Ireland – let alone the charity sector in 2019. The urgency of the changes that Covid imposed on innovating coupled with the scale and complexity was unprecedented in any other nominee. Especially as 1,366 separate sets of accounts across the country still needed to be consolidated in the worst months of the pandemic, without any additional resources invested into the finance team. Over 1,300 cocooning older treasurers had to be newly trained in different ways of financial accounting. The unprecedented success of the fundraising team and the generosity of the Irish public through Late Late show appeals quadrupled the number of transfers to the local branches as the year progressed.