How to Eliminate Manual Effort and Stress and Make Your Financial Close a Non-Event

The financial close continues to weigh heavily on accounting organizations. A typical global close for a large organization today can involve over 100 companies that must be closed before group consolidation, with more than 500 processes per company plus many more sub-processes and hundreds of thousands of SAP-related activities.

And all this frenetic activity always happens within the last few days of every month. It’s no surprise that the biggest concern, according to 97% of CFOs in a survey by FSN Research, is that finance and accounting won’t meet reporting deadlines.

One of the main issues for finance is that all this involves a huge amount of manual effort every month or quarter. A significant part of the close is performed outside of ERP systems and as much as 60% of the activities are still being done manually on spreadsheets.

The challenge for finance departments and shared service centers (SSCs) is to both reduce the manual effort across all these tasks and processes and to allow them to be carried out automatically throughout the month as they arise. This reduces pressure at month-end and means the financial close becomes something of a non-event.

The big question is how do you achieve that? It’s not just automating tasks; the crucial extra element is also orchestrating and executing those tasks automatically. Read Redwood’s new eBook “How to make your financial close a non-event” to find out how.

Automation allows finance to focus on what’s really important. Automation takes care of the control and production aspects so your finance team can devote its time to analysis and provide essential insights to improve the performance of your business.

Read the eBook and see how finance automation:

• Eliminates manual effort so you can switch the focus of finance staff from control and production to analysis
• Provides greater control, transparency and visibility over your close
• Helps the likes of Allianz, Arla, Faurecia and Genentech make their close a non-event.

Take global automotive parts manufacturer Faurecia, for example, which successfully automated 32,000 journal entries per month across 35 countries. With the help of Redwood, the implementation took less than six months to design, build, pilot, roll out and integrate. The results: 80% of the organization’s journal entry processes are now fully automated and it has significantly reduced the controllers’ workloads, allowing them to accelerate financial closing.

Learn how to make your financial close a non-event. Download the eBook now.