I believe technology is a critical enabler in any business, either to automate a business process or simply manage it.
We live in the era of data, globalisation and 24/7 service. This means that we must make decisions faster and we need facts to support our decisions. Many of these facts are generated during a business’ monthly financial close cycle. The challenge is that most businesses’ financial close is manual and slow.
Automating your monthly financial close and changing the rhythm from monthly to weekly is how you can accelerate decision making and then later breaking it down to a daily rhythm.
Should you wish to improve your financial close, I propose the following steps:
We live in the era of data, globalisation and 24/7 service. This means that we must make decisions faster and we need facts to support our decisions. Many of these facts are generated during a business’ monthly financial close cycle. The challenge is that most businesses’ financial close is manual and slow.
Automating your monthly financial close and changing the rhythm from monthly to weekly is how you can accelerate decision making and then later breaking it down to a daily rhythm.
Should you wish to improve your financial close, I propose the following steps:
- Step 1: Re-design the weekly rhythm of your finance function so that each week is treated as a small close cycle.
- Step 2: Re-design your monthly close to leverage your weekly rhythm
- Step 3: Consider a solution like ADRA, to automate and manage your financial close
- Step 4: Refine your process until it reaches maturity (this may take 3 to 6 months depending on your business and team)
