Accelerate Enterprise Digital Transformation - Finance Close Automation (FCA)

“Once a quarter, I used to do a vanishing act that any professional magician would envy, along with scores of accountants worldwide, I vanished into accounting’s month-end close cycle” writes Amir Jafari, Vice President, and General Manager of ServiceNow’s Finance Business Unit, in a very candid blog he wrote on the painful activity of finance close that every finance professional performs during the quarter close. 

As rightly shared by him, Finance Close is a rigorous, time consuming, and chaotic activity where the likelihood of errors is high. The finance team faces numerous challenges during the Finance Close period, such as 

• Long close cycles and high turn around time
• Excessive manual processes, including emails and spreadsheets, to manage financial close periods. 
• Inefficient, disparate processes and siloed data 
• Constant risk of financial-reporting errors and lack of visibility
• Coordination with a multitude of  team members reporting from different geographies that eats everyone’s productive time
• Multiple enterprise-resource planning (ERP) instances and third-party tools with integration gaps
• Disparate processes and procedures due to mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations
• Lack of real-time information for management

ServiceNow introduced Finance Close Automation (FCA) to improve finance professionals’ lives and save them from disappearing into the close-cycle void. It is one of the most fundamental processes that brings forth digital transformation in an organization paving the way for more efficient and optimized processes.

FCA is a central, cloud-based workspace for your finance team to manage all CCR-related activities and works alongside a company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system as a complementary toolset. It also makes use of Machine Learning to predict where issues might occur.

Benefits of FCA:

• Improve business processes, increase efficiency, and create a better work-life balance for employees
• Shift the finance team’s time to more strategic activities
• Accelerate financial close with digital workflows and end-to-end accounting automation 
• Reduce financial close risk through better controls, automation, and integration with governance, risk, and compliance;
• Identify bottlenecks and eliminate unproductive emails and meetings
• Consolidate dashboard and provide Real-time management insights

Reach us for assistance on how the Finance Close Automation solution from ServiceNow can transform your time-intensive, manual ways of working and add value to your finance close period. Let’s talk!