As an avid badminton player, I’ve always admired the sport for its combination of speed, precision and strategy. While speed and accuracy are essential, they alone don’t guarantee victory. It’s the right strategy or game plan that ultimately turns swift, accurate moves into winning shots.
A similar principle applies to financial close. Accelerating the financial close process is a top priority for CFOs, and finance teams are under increasing pressure to close books faster – so much so that “record-to-report” often feels like “race-to-report.” Speedy execution, however, is meaningless if it’s not accompanied by greater accuracy and enhanced insights. CFOs need timely, accurate data and clear, actionable insights to improve control and make more confident, faster decisions.
Adopt a Winning Financial Close Strategy
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has remarkable potential to accelerate financial close, improve accuracy and uncover valuable insights. I’ve seen it deliver outstanding results. However, with all the hype around AI and Generative AI (Gen AI), it’s important to remember that AI is a tool, not a talisman. As with all transformative technologies, the key to success lies not in the innovation itself but in how we adopt and use it.
Therefore, a winning strategy for optimizing the financial close should begin with the fundamentals: Identify your challenges and work backward to find solutions. AI may well be part of the solution, but we must avoid the mindset of ‘AI is the answer; now what’s the question?’
Identify the Critical Path
In my experience, most financial close delays stem from process design flaws and operational inefficiencies. It’s tempting to turn to technology to mend broken processes, but intelligent automation can’t fix fundamental flaws; it can only enhance a process that’s been appropriately designed and configured.
Imagine you were designing your close process from scratch. Ask yourself which activity is critical to your close, and then separate that work from non-essential tasks. What’s vital and what’s not varies from organization to organization. However, when conducting a critical path analysis with new clients, we often find that non-essential activities are bundled in with essential period-end tasks. This reduces focus and causes delays. Identifying and prioritizing essential close-related activities enable finance and accounting teams to close faster and on time, every time.
A rigorous critical path analysis often reveals essential but repetitive, manual tasks that are time-consuming and prone to errors – such as generating standard reports, data entry and reconciliations. These are prime candidates for automation.
Raise Your Game with Automation
Automation simplifies and streamlines the entire close process. An automated financial close solution can manage all your critical close activities through a single user-friendly platform. Finance teams can schedule recurring closing tasks, set alerts and track timely completion. This helps ensure deadlines aren’t missed and Service-level Agreements (SLAs) are met.
Visibility is essential. Automated platforms provide unmatched transparency. All activities are comprehensively tracked, empowering CFOs and their finance teams with insights into the status across the close cycle in all locations and geographies.
Accelerate Data Entry with AI
When automation is augmented with AI, we see step changes in speed, rigor and insight. AI automatically reads, extracts, matches and classifies all the data necessary to create Journal Entries (JE). It’s adept at working with multiple file types, including hard-to-handle handwritten documents. AI processes all the relevant information directly into your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, ensuring the accuracy and integrity of financial data. This eliminates manual data entry and helps teams achieve faster, more accurate financial closes.
Transform Reconciliation with AI and Gen AI
AI and Gen AI can revolutionize the reconciliation process. Payments, bank statements, and all Accounts Payable (AP) and Accounts Receivable (AR) activities can be matched autonomously. AI, trained on your specific business rules, can detect anomalies and flag potential issues. Gen AI takes this further by providing context and resolution recommendations, allowing teams to focus on resolving problems before they escalate. Over time, the system learns from these interventions, reducing the need for manual exception handling.
Hone Your Strategy with Analytics and AI
Advanced analytics significantly accelerates the financial period close by quickly identifying trends and abnormalities while generating comprehensive reports. By leveraging predictive analytics and improving collaboration, organizations can streamline their financial processes, reduce manual errors and ensure a faster, more accurate close.
AI spots trends at scale and predicts which journals will likely arrive late so you can take proactive measures to reduce this delay. You can also expect detailed insights into suspense and clearing accounts, and thanks to a streamlined financial close, your teams will now have the time to focus on resolving these.
Drive Informed Decisions for Sustainable Impact
A timely, accurate financial close, combined with reliable reporting, enables quicker identification of issues and opportunities and facilitates more agile and informed strategic planning for CFOs. This efficiency also reduces the risk of non-compliance with regulatory requirements, ensuring investors, creditors and other stakeholders have confidence in the organization’s financial integrity.
AI-powered analytics uncovers granular insights from the vast expanse of your data, while Gen AI-driven narratives bring those insights to life. This helps CFOs pivot faster, make more informed strategic decisions, reduce risk and drive organizational performance.
Talk to our experts to learn more about how our consultative approach and dedicated F&A technologies will accelerate your close and augment your operations.