Finance transformation is a broad topic that potentially encompasses all areas of finance process, personnel, and technology. When a firm faces a problematic, manually intensive, time-consuming, and unsustainable financial process, a transformation project is a call to action.
While finance transformation is a logical response to a sub-optimal financial process, these programs can easily overrun projected budgets and timelines, and often fail altogether.
It is imperative when initiating a finance transformation program to understand and target the specific issues to be remedied. Over time, financial processes can grow to be overly complex, requiring many points of time consuming, complex analysis and manual intervention. Poor data quality can render regulatory reporting a nightmarish experience with myriad reconciliations and top-side adjustments. Recurring piles of Excel journal uploads, manual re-class entries, suspense items, intercompany breaks, account misclassifications, incomplete reporting structures and more slow the monthly close and obfuscate the ledger.
While it’s often simpler to assess blame on the general ledger itself, initiating a book-of-work to replace the system, it is unlikely to have the desired result. The entire financial process from source systems to reporting must be analyzed without bias, and the remediation response targeted accordingly.
To learn more about the “hows” and “whys” of initiating a finance transformation program, download our insightful guide. You can fill out the form below, or you can find the guide here.
