An all too familiar finance challenge and the opportunity for workflow automation

Many finance organizations are struggling to reduce cycle times and provide relevant operational and financial insights to their leaders in a timely and consistent manner. Some of these organizations still perform planning and forecasting activities following email and Excel-based tracking processes that follow rigid deadlines that are challenging to enforce.

There is a stark contrast with between the acceptable lead time in completing a process in manufacturing as compared toand lead times in financial cycles. In a present-day manufacturing process, the duration of time to manufacture each product or part is actively managed and monitored against a targeted execution time. But with finance processes, it is typically acceptable to leave a 30-minute task that impacts the next step in the finance cycle in a queue for several days while competing priorities delay completion.

A well designed and tech-enabled workflow allows organizations to dynamically manage the financial cycles governing how time is allocated, track completion of activities, and collect feedback on various components of the cycle. More importantly, this allows the finance function to gather actionable feedback regarding finance operations so it can adjust and evolve performance in future cycles.

It is crucial to define and continuously improve the automated workflow for the financial close process, forecast cycles, and various operational reviews processes to actively evaluate how time is allotted and spent improving financial close and forecast submissions.

A well-designed automated finance workflow puts the right set of tasks in the right hands in a prioritized sequence that allows process orchestrators to understand where there is slack, compression, and opportunities for parallelism, and tasks that require better instructions to ease execution. Finance organizations achieving this level of maturity in standardization and workflow automation will benefit from more time for analysis and business partnering. This requires continuous improvement capabilities evaluating the end-to-end process, continuing to simplify workflow steps, measure performance, and consistently refine the workflows to enable business outcomes.

Imagining the finance of the future

Financial close and planning cycles are completed in less time with routine and quantitative processes automated. Only value-add insights are left to be input by people, reducing the chances of errors while increasing process transparency. Automated triggers kick off the next step of the automated finance workflow as prerequisite activities are completed. Organizations leveraging a continuous improvement mindset are actively evaluating the financial cycle and asking questions at each step: “Can this be automated? What business decisions are we enabling? Is this an appropriate amount of time for the task? Does this team have decision rights over this activity?” Asking such questions allows process orchestrators to get the decisions to the accountable parties as data becomes available, while looking for repetitive rules-based activities that can be automated. Leaders like Maggie and Anuj are empowered to make decisions powered by real-time data and insights. This level of visibility allows the organization to provide additional flexibility where it is needed, take out cycle time where it’s just slack, and identify tangible automation opportunities that were previously buried in Excel-based processes.