Finance AutomationFinancial Close and Accounting Automation for the Office of Finance

Your Office of Finance is the powerhouse of the business. It manages the money. Almost every function of the department is critical to the business: from planning, organizing and auditing, to controlling the company’s finances and preparing financial statements. The entire company’s success rests squarely on the shoulders of the Office of Finance.

Your Office of Finance manages the money—but is it on the money? Is it in control of its day-to-day processes? Ask yourself , Do you have:

• Full control of all your financial processes?

• More than just manual controls over errors?

• Complete control on all data feeds?

• Intelligent control on reporting?

• Total control on compliance within the processes?

Take the regular rush to close your organization’s books at the end of every fiscal period, for example. Every month-end, quarter-end, or year-end, scarce staff resources are absorbed managing the process. The root of the problem? Cumulative unresolved transaction issues, end-to-end process transparency issues and manually driven tasks such as data transferring or validation. It’s costing your business time and money.

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Why Finance Automation?

The answer is Finance Automation. It enables you to create, execute and monitor finance business processing quickly and easily, across on-premise as well as private/public clouds. Errors and delays are eliminated from end-to-end processes. Your interconnected finance data flows to the front-line more quickly. You gain control and free up time and resources to devote to more financial analysis.

Finance Automation supports all facets of finance. From intelligent interface management , period close of sub-ledgers through general ledger, distinct financial process improvements in payment batches, Dunning, and automated reconciliations between ledgers and financial consolidation, reporting and financial planning.

Why Finance Automation?• Close on time – every time• Accurate and consistent result• Create time for more financial analysis• Reduce stress in finance department

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Learn from the experiences of other leading businesses

This report examines the key capabilities your business needs to deliver faster, more accurate financial close and accounting processes that deliver on time every time. It brings together the experiences of more than 200 global organizations over the past ten years

The finance, business application and IT departments involved in these processes are successfully using Finance Automation to achieve real results. This includes:

• Improving financial reporting timing by 70% whilst reducing manual efforts by 90%

• Introducing 100% control over their financial close and accounting processes

• Increasing the number of books closed per month from 10 to hundreds with 80% fewer resources

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1. Single point of control and coordination

If your organization is like most, your accounting processes span multiple responsibilities and systems. A typical financial close process can consists of more than one hundred steps running across maybe six different systems. Multiply this by the number of operating units and subsidiaries involved, and the number and complexity increase significantly.

With the separation of duties across different departments and regional operating subsidiaries, and you are confronted with an extensive coordination effort where each step is exposed to a number of possible errors and delays that each have significant impact to the overall process delivery.

Centralized process management that can execute and control processes in ERP systems such as SAP or Oracle, non-ERP financial applications, and other data management technologies is critical to regaining control of financial close process. The capabilities needed to achieve this are:

• Every step of the financial close and other accounting process must be executed from a single platform. This eliminates latency between steps and removes a significant amount of manual intervention.

• Management visibility is required across your entire financial close and accounting processes (including operating unit and subsidiary sub-processes). This allows management to track process execution and take immediate action as exceptions occur.

• The ability to define service-level milestones across all your financial close and accounting processes is crucial. These milestones and possible issues should be visible to all of the stakeholders so problems can be proactively identified and resolved.

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2. Standardize financial processes across operating units and enable expansion

Financial processing needs to be standardised across the group. Consistent processing aides the closure process and provides accuracy across the group accounts.

As your business expands, so does the complexity of managing your financial accounting processes. As new operating units and subsidiaries appear, your company’s financial processes need to scale and incorporate new capabilities.

Standardizing, streamlining and dynamically expanding the scope of the financial close and accounting processes across multiple operating units and subsidiaries ensures you are consistent in operation and remain in control of your finance processes while you scale and adjust to change. The critical capabilities needed to achieve this are:

• Models that provide reusable process flows, making it fast and easy to standardize financial processes for all subsidiaries and operating units

• The ability to determine that a subsidiary or operating unit is active and ready to execute the close or other financial accounting process

• A process that dynamically determines when an organization has been added or removed and adjusts the accounting process as necessary.

• The ability to model variance for the likes of tax jurisdiction and accounting standards to enable a single model to be maintained across geographies.

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3. Catch data errors and notify responsible parties

Accuracy in financial reporting has always been essential. New regulations, management and customer demands for real-time information, as well as the need for agility in your organization, have made timely and accurate financial reporting increasingly more difficult.

Financial processes can often show a successful completion, even when there are data and reconciliation issues—for example if the system rejects one or more general ledger postings. To combat this, organizations frequently dedicate a significant amount of time and resources to checking the success of application processes for business-level issues. As with all manual processes, errors will occur. To compound the problem, as a system scales and the steps in the close process increase, the rate of errors will increase and even accelerate.

Any automation of financial processes needs to check for the business-level issues regardless of where they might occur. Extensive automated error-checking capabilities are required to “error proof” your financial processes to ensure the accuracy of your results. The critical capabilities needed to achieve this are:

• Validation capabilities so input parameters and data issues are detected before a process executes

• Verify completion status and data produced by preceding steps with flexible dependency checking

• Multiple ways to scan process outputs for issues including file scanning, database queries, and data integrity checks

• Automatic notification delivery, allowing responsible personnel to proactively take action to fix the errors or potential issues and remove the need for them to expend time in detecting the issue in the first instance.

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4. Track and ensure compliance with corporate and regulatory requirements

Manual tasks and hand-offs between people, processes and systems, limited control and visibility, and inadequate audit traceability are all potential compliance and regulatory problems.

Comprehensive audit reporting and control procedures are required to ensure your financial processes execute accurately. A comprehensive audit trail that documents changes to procedures and tracks problems ensures that your accounting procedures satisfy governance and compliance regulations, such as SOX and Basel II. The critical capabilities needed to achieve this are:

• Role-based access controls that ensure individuals only have access to the systems and data needed to perform their role. Data security issues are thus eliminated through minimizing the risk of error being introduced into the process.

• Process definitions must be fully auditable with details of who made the change, when it was made, and how the values were changed.

• Submissions, operational changes, and restarts of processes or steps in the process need to be fully auditable. Details of who made the change, when it was made, and what the values were changed to must be tracked as well.

• All aspects of process executions should be fully auditable, including parameter values, execution times and outputs.

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Accounting close• Condense the financial close process, ensuring faster feedback to your Board and to

analysts

• Automates manual finance processes, enhancing accuracy from Q1 to Q4 and enabling faster year-end closure

• Reduces the risk of poor closing processes; improves accuracy, timeliness and compliance

• Releases accounting staff from problem detection duties, accelerating productivity

• Frees up more time for deeper financial analysis and decision making

• Control of the process end-to-end ensures more accurate audit statements

Financial process automation• Automates manual accounting processes, lowering the cost of operation and reducing

errors

• Scales execution volumes, accelerating the accounting processing

• Ensures visibility of the end-to-end process

• Automates error detection and alerting, increasing accuracy and compliance

Financial consolidation, planning and reporting• Automates consolidation of operating units post closes, improving planning cycle with

financial close

• Provides controlled integration with planning tool, for more accurate reports at lower cost

• Ensures visibility of the end-to-end process

• Decreases errors and omissions in financial data for improved compliance

Interface management and accounting reconciliation• Delivers end-to-end monitoring and control over finance and accounting processes

• Enables your team to proactively determine risk

• Frees accounting staff from problem detection to concentrate on resolution

• Ensures consistent finance and accounting processes (for all operating units and all periods)

• Provides real-time estimation of financial process completion

Drawing it all together

You know better than anyone the importance of being in control of your finance processes. To create that control, you need to automate your processes and establish an end-to-end view of the processes. Through Finance Automation, the Office of Finance can quickly and easily create, execute and monitor finance application processing—from financial close and payment batches, to dunning, reconciliations and financial planning. As a result, you gain agility and are back in control—at significantly lower cost to the business too.

Finance Automation delivers competitive advantage across the spectrum of financial close and accounting processes:

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For more information or product demonstration please visit www.automic.com

Automic, a leader in business automation, helps enterprises drive competitive advantage by automating their IT and business systems - from on-premise to the Cloud, Big Data and the Internet of Things. With offices worldwide, Automic powers over 2,600 customers including Bosch, Netflix, eBay, AMC Theatres, Carphone Warehouse, ExxonMobil, BT Global Services, Société Générale, NHS SBS, General Electric and Swisscom. The company is privately held by EQT. More information can be found at www.automic.com.