Finance close automation (FCA) services

Navigating the complexities of the financial close process

A consistently timely, accurate, and efficient financial close is a challenge for many finance departments. As part of the CCR process, short bursts of activity take place throughout the year across multiple business units, IT systems, and databases. This limits visibility into the close process and handcuffs the finance department from focusing on strategic initiatives that drive growth and profitability.

Often, a company’s CCR process has been developed over time. This creates a mix of reconciliations, confirmations, reviews, verifications, and adjustments. These processes consume time and increase the risk of errors. Manual processes multiply this risk and create bottlenecks. Multiple investor and regulatory demands complicate the process.

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Key challenges of the financial close process

Explore the current challenges of finance consolidation in today’s market:

• Multiple enterprise-resource planning (ERP) instances and third-party tools with integration gaps

• Siloed data and CCR activities

• Disparate processes and procedures due to mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations

• Slow, error-prone manual workarounds

• Lack of visibility and real-time information for management

• Morale issues due to long hours and tedious, repetitive tasks

• Constant risk of financial-reporting errors

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Introducing the Finance Close Automation solution

Deloitte—in an exclusive arrangement with ServiceNow®—can help your organization transform the CCR process with the Finance Close Automation solution. As a global leader in finance transformation, we can help you digitize your CCR workflows and automate repetitive finance consolidation tasks. Imagine a central, cloud-based workspace for your finance team to manage all CCR-related activities. That’s the Finance Close Automation solution.

The solution also leverages Deloitte’s long history of implementing ServiceNow technologies within IT and human resource workflow environments.

Project and change management are critical to effective implementation, as with other digital transformation efforts. Failure to properly manage the transition can potentially lead to public embarrassment, especially for public companies whose financial reporting is scrutinized by both regulators and the investment community. An important element of that change management is effective and timely user training, which may be a challenge for finance functions that are not familiar with ServiceNow technologies.

Deloitte’s years-long, extensive experience in ServiceNow implementations can be a significant advantage for companies planning to deploy the Finance Close Automation solution.

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Our value proposition

We can help you accelerate the CCR process:

• Centrally manage the CCR process, end-to-end

• Facilitate journal entries, tasks, and follow-ups through coordinated workflows

• Smoothly integrate the solution with your organization’s ERP system(s)

Reduce CCR risks:

• Automate journal entry validation

• Identify and remediate process bottlenecks efficiently

• Digitize control and compliance tasks

And increase finance team satisfaction:

• Reduce or eliminate unproductive emails and meetings

• Reduce the need to switch manually between various tools and systems

• Reduce the potential for errors due to workarounds and manual tasks
  

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The benefits of finance close automation

What are the advantages to streamlining finance consolidation?

• Consolidated dashboard providing transparency into the entire CCR process

• Modern digital finance workflows designed, built, and implemented by finance professionals for finance professionals

• Real-time management insights into the CCR process, end-to-end

• Integration with and enhanced visibility across multisystem ERP environments

• Simplified complexity in a cost-effective, enterprise cloud environment

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Deloitte differentiators

Our end-to-end finance transformation services can help your organization with:

• Business finance

• Finance strategies

• Information and systems

• Operational finance

• Organization and people

• Process and policy

• Specialized finance

Deloitte—leading the way

• Deloitte ranked No. 1 globally in consulting based on revenue by Gartner.

• Deloitte named a global leader in finance operations consulting based on breadth and depth of capabilities.

• Deloitte named a global leader in financial transformation consulting services based on capabilities by ALM Intelligence.

• Deloitte named the undisputed worldwide leader in industry cloud professional services based on capability and strategy by IDC.
  

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Get in touch

Reach out to us and learn how the Finance Close Automation solution from Deloitte and ServiceNow can transform your time-intensive, manual ways of working into modern, digital CCR workflows. Let’s talk.

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