CPM

Tips to Automate and Unify Financial Close and Reporting Processes

2 min. read

Finance and Accounting teams must automate and unify financial close and reporting processes to move with agility through periods of disruption and volatility.

Organizations with complex and fragmented finance processes struggle to drive performance. Why? Each and every departmental and corporate application must undergo integration and validation of data from multiple sources — adding risk, cost, and complexity to already-taxed Finance teams.

It means all the core “financial logic” required to support monthly financial processes — such as debit or credit account types, multiple hierarchies, dimensionality, and currency translation — must be built completely from scratch.

Oracle falls short

Oracle Hyperion applications were market-leading products in their day, but their growth and innovation in conquering the complexity of the finance function have stalled.

There is no way to create custom, event-driven processes using native functionality. There is only one way to execute calculation scripts on the data; thus, customers are painted into a corner regarding reporting and user interfaces.

To truly become a strategic business partner, the Finance function must dramatically reduce its transactional workload. Unleashing the true value of Finance requires efficient processes that minimize manual tasks, such as performing allocations, calculating depreciation, or posting manual journal entries to free up the Finance team to focus on value-added analysis and decision support for the organization.

Re-imagining the financial close

Automating and unifying the financial close and reporting process ensures faster delivery of financial, operational, and sustainability/ESG results to management for accelerated decision-making. It also allows results to be delivered faster to external stakeholders.

  • Improve data quality and compliance - Integrating large volumes of transactional data from various sources allows organizations to move through the reconciliation and attestation processes seamlessly.
  • Saving time with automation - Identify and reduce repetitive manual tasks. Such automation is achieved by organizing all processes in a single unified platform and streamlining critical processes with interactive visualizations and collaboration capabilities to increase both control and accountability.
  • React faster to changes and identify abnormalities earlier. This increased visibility into financial and operational data can serve as an early warning system to help identify actions and enable informed decisions at the speed they require.

By unifying key financial processes, Accounting and Finance teams are empowered to manage risk and drive performance proactively. To unleash the entire organization with innovations that automate tasks, eliminate low-value processes and reduce risk, schedule your demo today.