Our 5 Top Tips for a More Efficient Financial Close
Time-consuming, challenging, costly, ineffective, all words we hear far too often when it comes to financial close. Anyone who works in accounting knows that financial close is the most important key challenge in any organisation. Making financial close an efficient process involves a team effort spanning the whole of the enterprise.
Here Are Our 5 Top Tips To Make Your Financial Close Process More Efficient
- Publish the timetable that that everyone involved knows the key milestone dates.
- Ensure that people are accountable.
- Make sure that proof of work is captured so that we can audit the close process after the event.
- Maintain a top-level oversight of the close process.
- Maintain balance sheet quality.
Many companies are still spending significant time and resources to audit the financial close process. Regulatory compliance, multiple reporting requirements and complex operations over wide geographic regions are some of the challenges companies are facing.
Our tools allow you to streamline period-end close and report financial results with confidence. Period-end close process can be improved by replacing manual checklists and procedures with a simple web based task preparation, review and approval of each step in the financial close process. You can monitor your close calendar activities such as list of manual journals, departmental tasks and SOX compliance controls.
Listen to Nigel King talk more about our 5 top tips
You can setup task frequencies (weekly, monthly, quarterly etc.), due dates relative to the accounting period end dates, and times, allowing tasks to be scheduled at precise intervals. The Chief Financial Officer and Controller can monitor progress throughout the financial close process with drill-down into tasks level to verify they are executed in order and on time.
Financial Close - Improve account reconciliation by:
- Automatically conducting variance and fluctuation analyses with a rules-driven process that monitors all balance fluctuations.
- Enforce reason codes for the appropriate account owners when rules are violated, eliminating the need for manual follow-up with phone calls and email.
- Monitor variance types for Budgeted vs. Actual, Forecasted vs. Actual, YTD, month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, and quarterly comparisons.
- Roll-up variance types for financial reporting and maintain flexible variance grouping.
- Setup reconciliation workflows and monitor the reconciliation process to save many hours during the period-end close.
- Track the ownership and status of each reconciliation task, across many periods.
- Access the reconciliation web page to easily the reconcile accounts and attach supporting documents to preserve the audit-trail and mitigate misstatement risks.
- Monitor the status of the account reconciliation process and generate reports.
Any risk of ageing items or delinquent reconciliations can be mitigated with email alerts. This approach eliminates the need to keep paper binders thus making the audits quicker and easier. Our tool will make your financial management more efficient thus improving company performance.