Have you automated your work with budget and forecast? Is your monthly closing process manual and full of time-consuming spreadsheets? The answer is Digital Finance.
The requirements for the financial departments are rapidly changing. Previously, the finance department looked at past results but now they are a provider of data insight that the company in the future will use as a foundation for making decisions.
The new demands in economics call for digitalisation. And all indications are that those who know how to take advantage of digitalisation will gain great competitive advantages in the future. Analyses show that the financial departments that have begun to digitalise work processes achieve significant business returns on digital investments.
If you spend (a lot of) time on inconsistent spreadsheets you are not the only one. Or if your monthly closing process is a (semi) manual and resource-intensive process you are not the only one either. Ventana Research concludes this in their analysis. The numbers speak for themselves. Many hours are spent on tasks that profitably can be digitalised.
44% struggle with inconsistent spreadsheets.
35% acknowledge that there are errors in the spreadsheets used in the company.
54% spend seven days or more closing the monthly accounts.
On average, 12 hours a month are spent on customizing spreadsheets.
Digitalisation is relevant in all the finance department’s core processes, such as bookkeeping, controlling, reporting, budgeting and forecasting. It is not only about reducing costs – but also about increasing quality and freeing up time for value-creating activities.
See examples of valuable applications here:
Master Data Management (MDM) is a method of managing and structuring your company’s master data within and between different systems. With an MDM system for your Business Intelligence solution, you have the opportunity to automate administration and collect, validate, structure and enrich e.g. chart of accounts, departments, products and customers in the same system.
The MDM system also helps to ensure the quality of your master data and can be used to identify missing and incorrect information on e.g. newly created master data. It allows you to continuously add and correct the information, so that the reporting is accurate at all times.
Process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI, Machine Learning technology) can be used as a supplement in the work processes and facilitate a large part of the manual work of identifying and solving the errors. It can ensure a higher level of accuracy in the rule-based and transaction-heavy work processes.
Business Intelligence (BI) can be used to provide insight into e.g. inconsistent master data, unfinished purchase orders, unapproved invoices, reconciliation of creditor entries, financial ledger and input to liquidity forecasts. You can automate data collection and form the basis of many operational KPIs.
With a Business Intelligence platform, consolidation and reporting can be streamlined. A large part of the manual work is automated through integration between the source systems. The consolidation process becomes transparent, and the reporting itself can be done with standard settings that are easily and quickly adjusted month by month.
A well-functioning data platform makes it possible to display structured and clear data to users in the form of KPIs, reports and visual dashboards. For users to optimize their time consumption, they receive training in the company’s BI tool so they can serve themselves with data.
With a digital approach, a budget and forecast tool can ease the time-consuming manual process and solve some of the challenges that finance departments experience. The process and interaction between all the budget managers can be streamlined by implementing a centrally managed, web-based solution.
In one system alone, it becomes possible to work simultaneously – and the actual collection, processing and consolidation of the data is automated and can easily be controlled by a central team. In addition, the many unused spreadsheets can be replaced with budget models, which ensure coherence and transparency in the many dependencies that exist between the individual budget managers.
Implement data visualization as a complement to the classic table reports. The most important variances in data become visible more quickly, and this frees up more time for further analysis. Data visualization must be seen as a language of communication that the finance department must adopt to be able to better analyze data and collaborate with the business.
At the energy company AURA, reports and analyses were designed by the individual employees and were spread across various file drives.
The management received a large amount of diverse reporting from the various departments, which included financial data, project data and customer data.
AURA Energi, therefore, wanted a digital solution that would eliminate manual reporting, gather data in one central place and provide greater insight into customer data. And that’s exactly what they’ve got.
“So far, the solution has eliminated some of the usual manual reports and replaced them with reports in Microsoft Power BI”.
– Isa Kjærgaard, Business Controller.
Annual closing is primarily characterized by getting things organized, recording everything, and getting control of the many reconciliations and documentation for the audit. Data must be prepared and shared, and here you can advantageously use your data platform to optimize the process.
The role of the controller in the future – become an economic business partner with data skills
The finance department is undergoing a continuous digital transformation, where several tasks are being automated. This often happens with the use of new cloud technologies within ERP and BI. This development means that the traditional role of the controller as an Excel expert, solving a range of pa...
How to get good financial data: 4 typical challenges and how to solve them
Have you invested in a Business Intelligence (BI) financial solution for your reporting, but found that the solution is not working optimally in your everyday work? Or are you on your way to starting your BI journey, but don't quite understand the technology behind it and the language that IT speaks...
Make Business Intelligence and data analysis an integrated part of the monthly closing process
The increasing use of data and the heightened demand for compliance puts pressure on the finance department during the monthly closing process. With BI and data analysis, you can minimize the time spent on data collection and processing, freeing up more time to create an overview, analyze, and repor...
Do as a large number of the country’s most ambitious companies:
Fill out the form or get in touch with Søren – then we can have a chat about your challenges and dreams.