Blog & Newsroom

Future-Proof Your IT Ops Now

In the wake of the ongoing global health crisis, business and IT leaders are looking for ways to improve the resilience of their operations no matter what is thrown at them. So what do organizations need to do to achieve this resilience, while also remaining competitive? An analysis conducted by Harvard Business Review (HBR) of the companies that flourished following the last three recessions found that the companies that emerged in the strongest shape “relied less on layoffs to cut costs and leaned more on operational improvements”

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Reboot automation for hybrid IT: Service orchestration and automation via SaaS

Hybrid IT is now an approach that is widely used by most companies to effectively manage their businesses operations. But running systems and applications across public and private cloud and on-premises technology brings additional complexity that needs to be managed. For a digital business to be competitive, it needs workload automation technology that goes beyond the traditional capabilities of legacy workload or scheduling tools to effectively deal with the range of systems and applications and the growing number of technology types being used.

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How to plug the Finance Automation Gap That ERP Alone Cannot Reach

It’s a long-held misconception that going through the pain and cost of implementing an ERP system — such as SAP or Oracle— across your business will solve all your financial efficiency and automation problems. In reality, while your ERP does tackle some of those issues there are parts it cannot reach. And that leaves you with a clear efficiency and automation gap for today’s complex finance and accounting processes. For their many powerful capabilities, ERP systems are designed to support rather than eliminate manual tasks.

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Automation as a Service Delivers the Best Customer Experiences

Reliability and scalability have always been key priorities for IT. With the unprecedented business impacts from COVID-19, they’re requirements. Your services – and your customers—depend on them. Many organizations spend significant time and expense to support the vision of an adaptable, always-on enterprise, and too many struggle to achieve it in spite of that investment. Time consumed by workarounds, patches, and daily management, and costs for on-premises hardware and licensing can quickly spiral out of control.

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How To Start Making Your Financial Close a Non-Event Today – With Standardized and Automated Finance Processes

Regardless of your industry, making the financial close a non-event – faster, more accurate, less stress – has long been the utopia of CFOs everywhere. And there’s good reason for that. Consider, for example, how much cost you would save by shaving even just one day off the time it takes to close the books. Research into the financial close by analyst Hackett Group shows that top performers close their ledgers earlier in the month and complete the process in less time than others in their peer group.

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The Evolution of Financial Shared Services – From Labor Arbitrage and Cost Reduction to Value Delivery

Despite moves to ease the lockdown, no one needs reminding that it’s still far from business as usual. The huge changes to working practices and processes forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the failings of some traditional approaches to finance. As an extension of many organizations’ accounting capabilities, financial shared services is far from immune to this increased scrutiny, with the current situation prompting questions about how smarter approaches are now needed more than ever before.

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Workload Automation is the Next Step for Digital Transformation

With the coronavirus crisis putting business as usual on hold, organizations are looking for more resilient ways to manage and reduce IT complexity. This combined with a sudden need to have employees operate remotely from multiple locations means that digital transformation plans are moving faster than ever. A key element in successful digital transformation, according to Dan Twing, president of Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™), is the modernization of “the IT tooling used to develop applications and manage the IT infrastructure.” This is where workload automation and job scheduling come in.

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Preparing for the New Normal: Four Priorities for CFOs in a Post-COVID-19 World

As CFOs adjust to our changing world, the shortterm focus is understandably on implementing tactical solutions to address the immediate challenges the coronavirus pandemic has created. But it is also imperative for finance leaders to think more strategically about the long-term picture and prepare for a post-COVID-19 world. Technology has been crucial in enabling business continuity and new ways of working through the crisis. It only serves to highlight that the future is most definitely digital.

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How to Prevent a Bad Audit: Four Things You Need to Address

The role of external auditors is ultimately to assess whether an organization’s financial statements are a true and accurate reflection of the performance of the business. In turn that gives stakeholders such as investors and partners confidence in the numbers. But this is no box-ticking exercise. The quality of the audit is paramount, particularly in light of high-profile cases where auditors have been fined for failing to identify fraud or financial misstatement that they should have spotted.

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COVID-19 Forces Finance Transformation Back to the Top of the CFO Agenda

If, six months ago, we had tried to predict the biggest business continuity challenge likely to affect your organization over the coming year, I doubt if the current global health pandemic would have made the list. There is, of course, a tragic human cost to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as we adjust to the new status quo, businesses are also being forced to rapidly adapt to new ways of working, extraordinary workforce challenges and unprecedented levels of uncertainty and instability.

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Throw Out the Manual. Why Auto-Certification Is Key to Faster and More Accurate Balance Sheet Reconciliation

Huge strides have been made in driving inefficiencies out of many financial processes. Yet balance sheet reconciliation is one of the last bastions of reengineering that has seen very little in the way of efficiency gains over the last decade. Traditionally, businesses have long relied on the accountant’s Swiss Army knife, the Excel spreadsheet, in conjunction with email, workflow systems and shared folders to help with the balance sheet reconciliation process. But it’s an approach that is fraught with problems and often fails to solve underlying issues.

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Purpose Built for SaaS: What It Means for Business

Several tool providers claim to offer workload automation via SaaS, but, in reality they offer on-premises solutions that have been lifted and shifted to the cloud, without any changes made to take advantage of the inherent benefits of this new approach. Sure, by moving existing workload automation tools to the cloud, organizations take away the burden of running the software on an in-house datacenter, but the tools themselves still have the same limiting legacy architecture that causes headaches for businesses and IT.

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Five Ways to Identify Intercompany Differences Earlier and Drive a Faster Close

Intercompany elimination is a common barrier to a fast and accurate financial close. For large global organizations operating across multiple geographies and time zones, coordinating all the intercompany activities at month-end quickly becomes complex due to the sheer volume and interdependency of tasks and tight deadlines. The problem is that intercompany accounting still requires enormous manual effort to reconcile, adjust and record transactions, despite large investments in ERP and finance systems. In fact, 40% of senior finance professionals say difficulties in reconciliations and intercompany agreement is what delays the reporting process the most,

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What Financial Scandals Show About the Fraud Risk of Manual Journal Entry

Despite large investments in modern ERP and finance systems, manual processes like journal entry continue to leave businesses exposed to significant human error or fraudulent activities. This ultimately creates the opportunity for the material misstatement of financial results and all the implications that brings. WorldCom is the poster child for these types of financial scandals, where manual journals were used to inappropriately capitalize expenses as fixed assets, which inflated net income and total assets by $3.8 billion.

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How Automation-as-a-Service Drives Success in Digital Transformation

Digital business transformation, defined by Gartner as “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model,” requires organizations to fundamentally change the way they operate to become much more agile. Workload automation as a service, delivered via SaaS, provides critical support for this agility by fully exploiting the attributes of cloud technology. One of the challenges that comes with digital business transformation is increased complexity due to a hybrid approach in which systems are located in and interoperate across different on-premises,

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Automate 70% of Intercompany and Unleash the Full Potential of Your Finance Employees

You’d think that the huge investments your organization has made in its finance and ERP systems would free you up from all sorts of drudgery and save massive amounts of time. In fact, back end accounting processes still require enormous manual effort and intercompany is no exception. Finance teams must plough through the vast quantities of transactions between subsidiaries and parent organizations that have taken place during the period, all of which need to be reconciled,

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How to Break the Legacy Workload Automation License Increase Cycle

I’ve talked in previous blogs about some of the limitations and barriers of legacy workload automation and job scheduling – how these outdated tools are not only inefficient, unreliable and costly but also how they shackle innovation and investment in digital transformation efforts. One of the major costs of using a mixed bag of legacy tools to support fragmented automation is that you pay dearly in license fees that continually increase but bear no relationship to KPIs or business outcomes.

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Why Internal Control Systems Won’t Protect You Against Fraud

Effective internal controls are the cornerstones of integrity for many organizations’ financial and accounting information, by promoting accountability and preventing fraud. At least that’s what we’ve long been led to believe. Not surprisingly, a huge amount of work goes into ensuring that controls are in place, documented and tested to provide evidence that they are designed and operating effectively. And yet all this work is for nothing if employees are able to circumvent the control structure.

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Why You Need to Switch Your Finance Team’s Focus from Production to Analysis

The benefits of automation strike a chord with many business functions. Automation allows you to spend less time on grunt work and spend more on analysis and interpretation. Finance is by no means an exception. The manually intensive nature of control and production processes is a thorn in finance’s side. When it comes to the mechanics of producing financial reports and other analysis, finance teams will typically spend 70% of their total time extracting raw data from the many and varied systems they use by means of downloads,

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The Human Cause of 4 Major Accounting Errors and How to Eliminate Them

The reliance on manual controls and procedures remains a major cause of some of the most common accounting errors. We’re not just talking minor errors, such as an unmatched invoice, either. These manual processes result in material misstatements of financial results or business performance. All too often, they go out externally to regulators and investors. This is despite investment—even recent investment—in ERP systems, workflow software and various point solutions. And just to be clear, for this blog I am just talking about human error.

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Modern Workload Automation as-a-Service Is the Path to Your Future

In today’s fast-changing and disruptive digital world, the pressure for organizations to innovate has never been greater. Yet the reality at the coalface for many infrastructure and operations (I&O) folk is being stuck running in place, struggling just to maintain the status quo. The more things change… Organizations are now at a tipping point where maintaining legacy status quo in IT while also trying to innovate and transform with modern technologies and cloud architectures is no longer sustainable.

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Four Undetected Errors That Add to Close Stress – And How to Fix Them

Anyone working in finance knows how stressful the monthly financial close can be. Immovable, tight deadlines and the manual nature of much of the process results in long hours that impact staff wellbeing, turnover, and often result in a reliance on temporary staff at this peak time. Frustrated staff have to work within sub-optimal processes that have evolved over years and don’t have the bandwidth to redesign them. Some of the biggest headaches are the errors that accrue but go undetected during the month and only come to light at the height of the period-end scramble.

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Manage and Perform: Why Workflow Software Isn’t the Answer for Your Financial Close

When we talk about finance automation and how it can help make the period-end close a non-event by reducing manual effort and errors and improving visibility and control, some people wrongly believe they are already doing that. “But I already have workflow software,” is a common response I hear. The truth is, however, that while workflow software does indeed automate to a certain level it tackles only around 30% of the close process. It automates the reminders and some of the handoffs and handovers,

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Ditch the Spreadsheet and Make Your Close Faster and More Accurate with Finance Automation

The month end close is a busy and stressful time for any finance team. One of the key elements to maintain some order within this chaos is task or checklist management. It’s vital to ensure the hundreds of closing tasks are all completed successfully, on time and in the right sequence. The problem is that most organizations still manage their close checklist in a very manual and inefficient way. This creates more stress and errors for those carrying out the tasks and has a negative impact on the accuracy and timeliness of closing the books and reporting group figures.

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