Blog Posts Business Management

How to drive a frictionless financial close

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

There are increased expectations from CFO’s for faster financial and management report delivery – not only to meet regulatory requirements which are becoming more stringent but also to enable quicker responses to business needs.

The goal of the one-day financial close or continuous close is no longer limited to a few organizations – it is increasingly becoming a CFO objective across all industries. This puts greater responsibility on the record-to-analyze (R2A) team to reduce financial close cycle times in addition to enhancing the accuracy of reported figures.

The close process is challenging as stakeholder inputs are required across a variety of departments based on data housed in different systems. Activities also need to be completed within the close period, which requires a great deal of follow up emails and team coordination – often in a highly stressful environment.

Proven ways to improve your close process

With this in mind, how can you ensure that your financial close process is frictionless? These five key points can help you reduce the cycle time of period-end activities, and help you transition to – what we call – the Frictionless Enterprise:

In addition to this end-to-end transformation that integrates your systems across the organization, a single ERP platform supported by multiple BlackLine or Cadency modules – and a rationalized chart of accounts and entity structure – can help you streamline your end-to-end R2A processes, leading to a truly frictionless financial close.

What frictionless finance can really offer

Implementing a frictionless approach to your close process can reduce your cycle time by 40–50% and lead to improved statement accuracy. This, in turn, can free up your finance teams to concentrate more on business-critical tasks and enable your CFO to focus more on the strategic priorities that really matter to them.

On top of this, removing the friction from your R2A process can help you implement continuous analysis and finance intelligence to enable informed business decision-making. This can lead to a confident, imperceptible period-end close with greater regulatory compliance, improved investor confidence, and enhanced market response.

What’s not to love about frictionless?

To learn how Capgemini’s Frictionless Finance leverages it’s partner technology ecosystem to drive the digital transformation of your finance function and deliver a frictionless close, contact: arush.kumar@capgemini.com

Arush Kumar is responsible for driving digital transformation of finance processes leveraging Capgemini’s Finance Powered by Intelligent Automation offer, which adds value to our clients’ business operations by implementing best-in-class processes and driving financial savings.

Leave a Comment

Get the BPI Web Feed

Using the HTML code below, you can display this Business Process Incubator page content with the current filter and sorting inside your web site for FREE.

Copy/Paste this code in your website html code:

<iframe src="https://www.businessprocessincubator.com/content/how-to-drive-a-frictionless-financial-close/?feed=html" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" width="100%" height="700">

Customizing your BPI Web Feed

You can click on the Get the BPI Web Feed link on any of our page to create the best possible feed for your site. Here are a few tips to customize your BPI Web Feed.

Customizing the Content Filter
On any page, you can add filter criteria using the MORE FILTERS interface:

Customizing the Content Filter

Customizing the Content Sorting
Clicking on the sorting options will also change the way your BPI Web Feed will be ordered on your site:

Get the BPI Web Feed

Some integration examples

BPMN.org

XPDL.org

×