Unprecedented demand for finance and accounting leaders to be more strategic in a period of historic business uncertainty, together with today’s workforce demanding more rewarding work and flexibility, is putting unsustainable pressure on people, processes, and technology.

For these reasons and more, achieving financial operations excellence is a priority for CFOs and controllers. Enter: Financial Operations Management (FOM).

FOM is the emergence of technology with solutions built on platforms that bring achieving financial operation excellence within reach of every organization. It does this by quickly integrating, orchestrating, and automating high-value accounting processes that often sit at the intersection of ERPs, subledgers, teams, and business units.

Financial operations excellence starts with packaged solutions designed to accelerate.

5 Keys to Financial Operations Excellence

1) Leverage Solutions That Drive Financial Close, AR & Intercompany Excellence

  • The cost of accounting operations is up to 3X more at companies that rely on manual effort. In an era of business and financial transformation, that is unsustainable.
  • PwC found that nearly $1.4 trillion is held hostage globally on companies’ balance sheets.
  • According to Hackett, intercompany has one of the largest disparities between the efficiency of world-class and peer-group finance organizations.

These are some shocking stats. However, built on a FOM platform, financial closeaccounts receivable, and intercompany accounting applications can automate, centralize, and standardize these processes, resulting in overall excellence.

2) Offer Users a Mobile, Modern, Work-From-Anywhere Experience

A robust, unified, and native mobile experience is crucial for managing journals, certifying journals on the go, notifying the team of critical activities and tasks, and accessing reporting and dashboards allowing leaders to make decisions and assign tasks from anywhere. The platform must provide the enabling integration to extend financial operations management to every corner of the organization at scale with SSO, identity management, role-based and granular security, and globalization.

3) Focus On Intelligent Process Automation & Standardization

Purpose-built intelligent process automation frees F&A to focus on exceptions and analysis. It enables accounting to move to an exception management mindset: allow the computers to do the mundane work and surface items for higher-value analysis better executed by an accountant. Financial Operations Management Platform capabilities execute key accounting tasks end-to-end, intelligently, with little to no human intervention.

4) Ensure Enterprise Security

A FOM Platform centralizes accounting data and processes for the most common accounting activities—like journal entries, reconciliations, and intercompany accounting—reducing data silos, spreadsheets, and manual extracts/imports that are often vulnerable.

5) Elevate Operational F&A Reporting & Analytics

A Financial Operations Management Platform not only accelerates financial close processes to speed downstream financial reporting and FP&A processes, but it also provides a clear perspective on operations excellence and opportunities to improve processes, from speed to quality to reducing financial risk. Achieving financial operations excellence requires instant visibility into operating metrics that elevate collaboration and efficiency and reduce roadblocks.

Financial Operations Management has arrived to enable CFOs and controllers to deliver on the promise of fast, efficient, and predictable finance and accounting process excellence. It’s the evolution of solutions and technology to deliver digital transformation for finance.

Ready to learn more? Discover additional keys to finance operations excellence with your complimentary copy of our white paper: The New Era of Financial Operations Management.