How to Maximize the Value of Your Financial Close Management

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Financial close is a painful process, and everybody wants to make their business processes faster and more streamlined. Organizations often seek an efficient way to manage their financial close because it likely consumes a significant portion of the finance team's bandwidth.

There's often constant pressure on businesses from regulators and stakeholders to streamline the close and reporting process, ensuring timely reporting. Many companies struggle to complete their financial close and reporting on time due to the unorganized data sources and manual effort. This result is paving the way for companies to look for cloud solutions.

We see an increasing number of companies adopting cloud solutions to drive integrated and automated financial consolidation and close processes. Here are six priorities you should 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, including close monitoring, reconciliations, data integration, consolidation, and reporting, into a single, end-to-end solution is the most effective way to achieve a speedy close and efficient reporting processes. You can complete the visibility across all your data sources and third-party applications.

2. Out-of-the-Box Functionality

Any organization that plans to implement a robust automation solution will need to identify a cloud solution that offers pre-configured, out-of-the-box standard calculations, dimensions, dashboards, and reports.

3. Built-In Best Practices

To achieve the best results with a cloud solution, selecting a cloud-based solution with prebuilt financial intelligence makes sense. This includes reporting capabilities such as a balance sheet, configurable cash flow, and income statement, as well as built-in best practices like multi-GAAP functionality that incorporates both U.S. GAAP and IFRS guidelines.

4. Flexibility

All cloud solutions will have best practices, but many organizations will still be trying to identify a cloud solution that is flexible enough to allow them to follow their processes as required.

Ideally, the cloud solution should have additional pre-seeded dimensions, financial reports, ratio analyses, translations, as well as elimination and consolidation rules. An organization that does not want to use the existing pre-built multi-GAAP functionality, account hierarchy, or pre-built ratios should have the flexibility to create custom dimensions, additional COA members, and additional ratios to support specific reporting and analytical needs.

5. Automated Processes

An automated process helps you eliminate repetitive tasks and bottlenecks. Hence, organizations should look for cloud solutions that offer the option to auto-schedule data loads, consolidation runs, report publishing, backup, and other application maintenance activities.

Identify a cloud provider that regularly updates its cloud application with the latest innovative features, which get rolled out to users seamlessly when released, without any disruptions or downtime.

6. A Positive User Experience

Choose the right solution with real-time data dashboards, role-based tasks and work areas, and a tablet-friendly design for mobile users to streamline your workloads and make the finance team more efficient and productive. Ultimately, users are the primary consumers of Cloud EPM. A simplified and business-friendly user interface and features will ensure better system adoption and success.

FAQs

1. What is financial close management, and why is it important?

Financial close management refers to the process of finalizing all accounting transactions for a specific period. It ensures accuracy in financial reporting, compliance with regulations, and informed business decisions.

2. How can I speed up the financial close process?

You can accelerate the close process by automating reconciliations, standardizing workflows, using cloud-based financial tools like Oracle Cloud EPM, and reducing manual data entry.

3. What are common challenges in financial close management?

Key challenges include data inconsistency, manual processes, lack of integration across systems, tight deadlines, and compliance risks-especially in multi-entity organizations.

4. What tools help improve the financial close process?

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platforms, such as Oracle Cloud EPM, offer automation, dashboards, and analytics to streamline and optimize the close process.

5. How do I know if my financial close process is efficient?

An efficient close process is timely, accurate, and repeatable. Benchmark your cycle time, error rates, and resource utilization against industry standards to assess performance.

SMACT Works houses a team of experienced individuals who offer impeccable Cloud services, including cloud advisory, rapid cloud migrations and implementations, and Cloud microservices. SMACT Works is an Oracle-managed service provider with notable experience in integration, support, and migration. Contact us today for help with maximizing your financial close management.