Tell me if this sounds familiar, just around the start of holiday preparation (say mid-November) while the rest of the world is thinking about filling their pantries with holiday goodies, gifting, and family, you feel the buildup of annual stress and pressure due to the financial year-end close looming overhead. In mid-December the fire drill begins and you are in the thick of your company’s annual financial close.
When it’s all said and done in February, you get an email from your CEO to discuss your manual reconciliation process. The conversation quickly turns into a debate about the financial close results and data that (of course) can’t be aggregated very easily. The CEO also expresses concerns about issues potentially lingering within the reconciliations. Ugh, what a nightmare!
If this conversation hasn’t happened to you yet, it probably will in the upcoming months. Why? Increasing the timeliness of your financial close just isn’t enough to remain competitive. Today, corporations need financial departments to deliver: improved financial governance, increased transparency and reliable data while, proactively managing the challenges of data quality. Let’s not forget about the preparation inevitably needed for new regulatory requirements as well.
No one wants to anticipate annual job-related stress or have the conversation above. You know the drill – manually executing a financial close almost always churns up one of the following pitfalls:
- Execution of risky processes. Manually “eyeballing” piles of spreadsheets, reports, trial balance postings and journal entry uploads is risky and dramatically reduces the speed of a finance close.
- Poor visibility and/or management oversight.For many corporate and consolidation teams, visibility is only as good as the, often times, spotty communication between the many people involved in every transaction that leading up to the close.
- Poor data integration across systems and processes. Most companies rely on a complex IT system with no central point of contact, control or reconciliation to run all of the daily processes that feed into finance. Corporate-wide process standards are also usually nonexistent.
Slow performance and delays. In many companies, just beneath the surface, all close processes depend on unreliable, conflicting and time-consuming email and voicemails circulated throughout the company.
Recognizing manual pitfalls is half of the “financial close battle”. In order to propel yourself into superhero stardom you must adopt a much more practical approach achieved through financial automation. Financial automation ensures that every stage of the financial close cycle is executed with reliability, speed, efficiency, and compliance. Think of it as your “super belt”. Oracle Hyperion EPM is an excellent financial tool that has been recognized as the world’s leading financial automation solution mainly because it does it all:
- Fully monitors and traces all activities from a central point
- Eliminates manual errors and labor-intensive manual updates
- Automates common Financial Close transactions
- Handles exceptions and notifies team members immediately
If you can, start the financial automation process today by evaluating automation platforms and the financial processes that can be improved in your organization. The sooner you begin to evaluate financial automation solutions, such as, Hyperion EPM the sooner you can reap the benefits. Also, don’t forget you will forever be known as a financial superhero legend amongst all of your financial peers.
If you have any financial automation or Hyperion EPM questions please feel free to reach out to me at timsimkiss@biztech.com.
