Close Books Faster & Error Free
There is always a challenge to close the accounting books quickly and publish the statutory balance sheets with profit and loss accounts statement or for that matter internal financial MIS for monthly quarterly or yearly. There are various challenges when there are group of companies, local subsidiaries, international subsidiaries, branches, strategic business units, sister concerns, joint ventures, merger, acquisitions, investment companies, SPV’s etc. data to be consolidated in single financial reports.
CFO team is always under pressure to publish quarterly, half yearly and yearly statements based on Indian GAAP or US GAAP or IFRS or any other formats of publishing data. There are challenges to map and consolidate data from multiple entities, multiple accounting period and multiple currencies. Finance team lead by CFO works days and weeks on multiple spreadsheets to arrive a final statements. While doing this exercise finance team faces several challenges.
Traditional FCM (Excel) Challenges:
- Little centralized control on spreadsheet published data
- Poor data integrity; chances of error very high
- Inflexible reporting, so cannot do any analytics on data
- Unmanageable consolidation mechanics for mapping chart of accounts hence time consuming
- Little facility to view data across different dimensions, periods, currencies, ratios etc.
- IT department dependence for extraction of data
- Inability to react and reflect change in case if any
- Lack of integration with other systems and purely manual each time same laborious work
- No dynamic financial statements as no BI reporting layer
- Rigid templates for each user involved for creating trial balances
- No security at the account level
- No support for multiple line items in an account
- Slow turnaround as no historical data management
- No analytical reporting with Dashboard & KPI
Accelerate the close cycle and improve the quality of data – remove the pain of consolidation of financial management & reporting cycle. Organizations that are able to close their books quickly & deliver faster & more accurate information can gain a competitive advantage in a rapidly changing market.
1KEY Financial Consolidation Management (FCM) is a complete data warehouse (DW) model with standard statutory reporting requirements for publishing financial statements and with extensive analytical reports. It provides financial managers the ability to rapidly close and report financial results, meet global regulatory requirements, reduce compliance costs and provide confidence in the numbers.
With 1KEY FCM, CFOs can overcome
- Struggle of weeks to consolidate financial data at multiple levels
- Fragile nature of spreadsheets, links, changes, errors in unsuspected cells & redoing consolidation during reorganization
- Difficulty & confusion to use and rely on IT team to deliver the on demand report which takes time where only thing that matters user is the answer to the question of a moment
- Limitations of ERP reporting toolset and predefined set of reports with general purpose query tools for generating reports with data within ERP database
- Booking adjustment entries in ERP & replicating multiple times for each company / branch / location
- Inter-company eliminations which cause delays, while reconciling the differences between the companies using spreadsheets
1KEY FCM reduces finance team work from few weeks to days and most important error free with audit trail. Our implementation team will ensure right extraction of data from SAP, CBS, Back Office or any other ERP data sources and import it in DW model of 1KEY FCM. Then map chart of accounts and automatically all reports for statutory publishing will be available with internal analytical MIS for group reporting scenarios.
Closing Books is getting increasingly complicated and harder to manage for CFO and his team. Each group of companies has different information needs, and therefore different data processing requirements. Configure 1KEY FCM based on actual needs to help his team save time and effort in a streamlined group reporting process: team can now focus their effort on other high priority jobs that add more values to the organization.
1KEY FCM gives CFOs an ability to:
- Reduce consolidation, close and reporting cycles by days or weeks and deliver timely results internally and externally
- Improve data quality to achieve confidence in the numbers – a full audit trail for statutory and regulatory compliance
- Cut compliance costs & deliver a single version of the truth through the Web to improve internal and external transparency
- Use 1KEY BI to create ad hoc and management reports quickly and easily
- Easily conduct in-depth analysis of key performance and operational metrics
1KEY FCM is a highly effective yet user-friendly, intuitive solution to manage financial consolidation and group reporting process. 1KEY FCM helps you avoid common pitfalls in consolidation process, and move on to develop more structured, efficient and highly sustainable solutions. By working through the detailed steps in each process, CFOs can now have an effective suite of solution that simplifies and automates FCM process into just a few clicks on buttons!
Posted on February 8th, 2010 by Ashwin Dedhia
Filed under: Business Intelligence, View Points & Perspective
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