Delivering Financial Excellence

Delivering Financial Excellence 

In the face of demands to deliver more value, increasing regulatory compliance, and growing pressure on margins, finance organizations must put in place best practices that enable them to excel in three key areas

DELIVER OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE At the same time, finance departments mustn’t forget the core services they supply to the organization, like credit checks, collections, invoice and expense processing, and bank transactions. The challenge here is to optimize finance processes and create efficient and collaborative relationships with customers, suppliers, banks, and government authorities to drive payment compliance, deliver strategic insights, and decrease the overall cost of finance. Leading finance organizations are using shared services to standardize and syndicate business practices. As a result, they can streamline financial processes across the organization. This can improve the speed and accuracy of transactions, reduce days sales outstanding and late payments, optimize working capital, ease resource demands, and ensure fair and accurate handling of payments and receivables. With consistent processes across the organization, measurable service-level agreements can be put in place that drive up service levels.

SIMPLIFYING FINANCE ENSURE REGULATORY COMPLIANCE AND EFFECTIVE RISK MANAGEMENT Because finance departments are having to cope with an increasing volume of country-specific regulations, risk and compliance checks and controls can no longer be seen as separate items. They must be simplified and embedded in all aspects of finance, from transaction processing to financial reporting, and monitoring must be automated to proactively identify potential risks and ineffective controls. To protect valuable financial data, organizations must automate access management. They must also ensure processes are tightly controlled to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive and key corporate assets, as well as detect fraud and abuse. In unpredictable financial markets, financial risk management for credit, debt, and financial instruments has never been more imperative. Organizations must optimize cash flow and liquidity management, streamline communications, and integrate treasury functions with multiple banks while maintaining greater control over payable and receivables processes. Fast, accurate, and efficient financial closing is also extremely important in meeting the expectations of internal and external stakeholders. Closing processes must be streamlined, able to manage multiple accounting standards, comply with regulatory filing mandates, and capable of effectively managing the vast amounts of data involved. In addition, organizations need the ability to quickly and flexibly report on results, including narrative information for annual reports.

4 DEVELOP CLOSER BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS With the pressure to deliver greater value increasing, finance executives must engage more closely with the business to drive innovation. Business leaders need the ability to rapidly and efficiently assess the cost and benefits of new business models, including product line introductions, expansion into new territories, and mergers and acquisitions. They must be able to tell the story behind the numbers to get buy-in from stakeholders across the organization. This will necessitate rapid planning and forecasting using simulations and the predictive analysis of multiple business options. Business leaders also need to understand the drivers of profitability in their organizations across multiple dimensions to adapt strategies and plans as events unfold. Central to this will be the ability to give executives real-time, personalized access to critical financial information and key performance indicators (KPIs), with functionality to drill into data to determine root causes. By using the same data for all transactions, analytic s, and regulatory and management reporting, finance executives can reduce the need for reconciliations and increase the consistency of reports. In addition, they will be able to run even resource-intensive processes at any time during a period, giving them greater insights into the organization’s financial position. “Now we have established the foundation that will completely renew the user experience in finance to make it more personalized, responsive, and simple.