How to maximize the value of your Financial Close Management?
APRIL 07, 2021 06:41 AM
Need for an Easier, Faster, Efficient Financial Close
Financial close is a painful process and everybody wants to make their business processes faster and more streamlined. Organisations will always look for an efficient way to manage their financial close, as it currently exhausts a major part of finance team's bandwidth.
There will always be pressure on the business from regulators and stakeholders to gear up the close and reporting process and ensure reporting on time. Most companies will be struggling to complete financial close and reporting on deadlines due to the unorganized data sources and manual effort. This result is paving way for companies to look for cloud solutions.
We are seeing more and more companies looking at cloud solutions to drive an integrated and automated financial consolidation and close. Oracle survey held recently found that more than half of respondents are planning to move consolidation and close to the cloud.
Here are six priorities you shall consider when looking at Cloud-based financial close solutions for stacked deadlines, an overload of spreadsheets and more manual interventions than you can track.
1. An End-to-End Solution
Streamlining all your financial close processes like close monitoring, reconciliations, data integration, consolidation and reporting into a single, end to end solution is the most effective way for a speedy close and reporting processes. You can complete the visibility across all your data sources and third-party applications.
2. Out-of-the-Box Functionality
Any organization which has the plan for robust automation solution, would need to identify a cloud solution which has pre-configured, out-of-box standard calculations, dimensions, dashboards, and reports.
3. Built-In Best Practices
For getting best results in cloud solution selecting a cloud-based solution with prebuilt financial intelligence makes sense - reporting capabilities like balance sheet, configurable cash flow, and income statement and built-in best practices such as multi-GAAP functionality that incorporates both U.S. GAAP and IFRS guidelines.
4. Flexibility
All cloud solutions will have best practices but still many organizations will be trying to identify a cloud solution which is flexible enough to allow them to follow their individual process as required.
Ideally the cloud solution should have additional pre-seeded dimensions, financial reports, ratio analyses, translations, as well as elimination and consolidation rules. Organization which does not want to use the existing pre-built multi-GAAP functionality or accounts hierarchy or pre-built ratios, should have flexibility to create custom dimensions, additional COA members as well as additional ratios to support specific reporting and analytical needs.
5. Automated Processes
Automated process helps you get rid of repeated tasks and eliminates bottlenecks. Hence, organization should look for cloud solutions that have option to auto-schedule data loads, consolidation runs, report publishing, back-up, and other application maintenance activities.
Identify a cloud provider who regularly updates their cloud application with latest innovative features, which gets rolled out to users seamlessly when released, without any disruptions or downtime.
6. A Positive User Experience
Choose a right solution with real-time data dashboards, role-based task and work areas, and a tablet-friendly design for mobile users to make your system streamline your workloads and make the finance team functioning more efficient and productive. At end of the day users are ultimate consumers of the Cloud EPM, a simplified and business friendly user interface and features will ensure better system adoption and success.
SMACT Works houses a team of experienced individuals that offer impeccable Cloud services like Cloud advisory, Cloud rapid migrations and implementations, and Cloud microservices. SMACT Works is nearly a decade-old Oracle managed service provider with notable experience in integration, support, and migration.
SMACT Works is a technology-focused systems integrator and IT/ERP consulting firm. We deliver end-to-end consulting, managed, and implementation services for Oracle Cloud Applications, IaaS & PaaS, On-Premise PeopleSoft & EBS Applications. Headquartered in Dublin, OH, we have a global presence with North America and Asia offices. We are an Oracle Gold Partner Cloud Standard, ISO 9001, and 27001 certified delivery organization serving customers with Excellence and Integrity.
