How to Drive More Value Through Financial Close and Reporting Improvement

Reporting financial results faster and more accurately

We’ve helped some of the world’s leading companies with their efforts to improve their financial close, consolidation, and reporting processes. Here are some of the key lessons we’ve learned along the way:

1. Break down the process.
It is easy to become overwhelmed with the notion of making improvements to such a complex and dependency-oriented business process when you have to deal with the issues associated with activities such as multiple-tiered consolidations, intercompany eliminations, and allocations. But, start with the current close and reporting calendar and identify the major components and the dependencies. Then, challenge everything and look for hours, not just days.

2. Focus outside the Finance group.
Engage external stakeholders (e.g., business units, IT, and operations departments,) from the beginning to secure their input and support, because many of the gains achieved during a financial reporting improvement project can be yielded by changes upstream in the business processes.

3. Encourage fundamental change.
Recognizing and rewarding those who display the ability to think differently, challenge longstanding premises, and engage in initiatives that accomplish stepped improvements in performance can support achieving improvement targets.

4. Get support from leadership.
Visible support for global process standardization and accounting simplification from senior-level executives within the Finance group, as well as business unit finance departments, can provide the necessary emphasis to make the changes take hold within the company’s finance function.

5. Think holistically about reporting.
Reporting should help enable efficient measurement of financial and non-financial metrics against strategic initiatives that support corporate imperatives and drive shareholder value. This undertaking should align with or, at a minimum, take into consideration other reporting initiatives, such as the development of an Integrated Performance Management framework.

6. Need drives technology – not the other way.
Leverage technology to help enable process efficiencies, eliminate spreadsheets and replace disparate systems vs. designing new processes within the limitations of existing technology solutions or by selecting a technology before understanding your requirements.

7. Don’t forget controls.
Establish a governance structure to align process improvement opportunities with necessary core controls to help address close process risks and control deficiencies to better enable sustained long-term compliance.