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Modern Accounting: Highlights from Beyond the Black 2022

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Beyond the Black 2022, the premier event for Finance and Accounting leaders and innovators, took place last week in Las Vegas. The conference featured many sessions on hot topics for Finance and Accounting. These included Winning the War for Talent, 2023 Predictions for Finance and Accounting and Why AR Management Needs to be at the Top of Finance’s Agenda and ESG.

Several Revelwood team members attended the event. We met many people from the BlackLine team in person, learned about new features that have recently become available and gained an understanding of BlackLine’s vision for the future. BlackLine’s long-term goal is to be a single platform where all accounting tasks can be completed. They continue to execute on that goal by releasing new products like the cash application & accounts receivable module and intercompany transactions module.

Here are some highlights of the conference, courtesy of BlackLine’s blog:

How Aetna is Driving Continuous Innovation with Its Center of Excellence Model

To best serve the business, Aetna’s accounting and finance team established a Center of Excellence focused on transforming processes and reducing manual work. Since 2018, the Aetna COE has brought standardization, efficiency and leading practices to the organization. Attendees heard how Aetna is delivering measurable results, freeing up resources and improving controls with BlackLine and its COE model.

How a REIT Uses BlackLine Task Management to Close (While Having a Little Fun, Too)

LXP Industrial Trust understands that innovation and technology are essential to growth and continued success. The session provided insights into how LXP utilized BlackLine Task Management to help transform and modernize its journey to modern accounting. LXP talked about how they created the BlackLine Intergalactic Highway for a fun way to encourage staff interaction and facilitate an accounting transformation from the traditional way of working to optimize its accounting processes, thereby creating capacity for Accounting to focus on what matters most.

How Dun & Bradstreet Uses BlackLine in a Shared Service Environment

The Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) controller organization unleashed the power of transformation internally by enabling their global teams to share a common platform to improve transparency, standardization and automation. D&B shared their accounting journey and the strategies deployed to transition from life before BlackLine to their current best-in-class center of excellence.

There are many, many stories about how BlackLine helps companies to transform and modernize their accounting practices. We look forward to sharing more success stories.

Learn more about Modern Accounting with BlackLine

Modern Accounting: Does Your Accounting Team Have SMART Goals?

Modern Accounting: Streamlining the Month-End Close

Modern Accounting: The Impact of Investing in Accounts Receivable

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Modern Accounting: Does Your Accounting Team Have SMART Goals?

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This is a guest post from our partner BlackLine, explaining SMART goals and how they can help accounting managers.

One of the most widely used—and effective—approaches to goal setting is called SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This helps you and your teams create clear goals with defined and attainable objectives.

Many accounting managers struggle with the annual goal-setting process. It can be hard to quantify the work of the folks who do the counting—which is ironic, but quite common outside of sales teams. Accountant routines can vary significantly and tend to be driven by outside factors.

But setting smart goals for accountants is a critical part of ensuring a successful year. They help you and your teams be intentional about what you want to focus on and accomplish and create alignment across the entire F&A organization.

How to Write SMART Goals for Accountants

Make Your Goals Specific

The more specific a goal is, the more attainable it will seem, and the more likely you’ll achieve it because you’ll know exactly what you need to accomplish in this area.

It’s okay to start with a larger goal, but then break it down into smaller goals that are more specific. Determine why this goal is important—for the individual, the team, and the broader F&A organization—and then talk about the short and long-term impact of achieving it.

To get even more specific, determine the exact outcome you want.

Make Your Goals Measurable & Attainable

Next, quantify your goals so you’ll know how to measure process and when they’ve been accomplished. This is often the most difficult part of setting SMART goals for accountants, and if a goal doesn’t seem quantifiable, try rephrasing it so it’s possible to measure.

It’s equally important to ensure the goal is attainable. Stretch goals are great, but impossible goals will only lead to overwhelm and frustration. Make sure the time frame is reasonable and identify anything that could get in the way of achieving the goal.

Removing those barriers should be the first step.

Make Your Goals Relevant & Time-Bound

Every goal must have importance to the broader organization as well as the individual. Uncover the why here, so the reason this is a priority is clear. This can also increase the individual or team’s motivation to achieve this goal.

Creating a reasonable deadline for each goal is also critical, along with regular check-ins to ensure you’re on track. It’s okay to have some flexibility in adjusting this deadline as needed, especially if things come up and get in the way.

This is, however, why it’s so important to identify and remove those barriers as the first steps toward the goal.

Strategies for Effective Goal Setting

Here are three strategies to incorporate into your goal-setting process that will make your accounting and finance teams far more effective in the future.

Take a Project-Based Approach

Most of us have down time here and there that we could utilize to work on a project. Talk to each of your team members about coming up with a project that contributes to their own development, helps them connect with others, and causes them to look at their job in a new way.

For example, a Senior Staff Accountant could conduct a skills training to help accountants keep up with changes in the industry. Or, maybe you believe your AR team could be more efficient but you’re not sure. Why not give them a goal to identify areas they can improve? You may be surprised at how many great ideas surface that could save the team some time.

Create Opportunities to Strategically Develop New Skills

With the rise of new tech like robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, strategically developing skills to prepare for the future of finance is more essential than ever.

The exceptional accountant of tomorrow needs to begin cultivating effective communication abilities, data analysis, business acumen, and creativity — today. These capabilities will equip teams to deliver predictive insights for leadership, drive data-based decisions, and provide expert counsel.

Developing opportunities for accounting and finance professionals to problem-solve more creatively, learn new technology, and build relationships with other departments can make a massive difference on an individual and team level.

Carefully Craft Your Culture

A carefully crafted culture creates competitive advantage. It improves quality of work, boosts productivity, engagement, and retention, and reduces stress and healthcare costs.

But if this isn’t a current focus at your company, where do you even start?

A team brainstorming session can be an excellent first step. Involving your people in culture discussions can make them feel invested and as important as they really are. They’re also the ones who will be able to quickly identify what needs to change, along with the most effective approaches.

Give your leaders the responsibility of planning regular team-building events. This can be anything from fun, off-site events to a team appreciation lunch at the office. The goal should always be to bring the team closer and help them maintain better relationships, generating understanding and a deeper respect for each other.

Put Your People First

Done right, setting smart goals for your accountants can create a shared vision that makes your teams feel inspired and connected. And when the strategies within that vision meaningfully contribute to the entire organization, you can count on a higher level of buy-in.

It all comes down to putting your people first and setting them up for success. If you continually look to the future of finance and equip your teams for the new digital landscape, your F&A organization will thrive.

Creating smart goals and creating a great culture can help F&A teams retain top talent, which is a challenge in today’s business environment.

This blog post was originally published on the BlackLine blog.

Read more about Modern Accounting:

Modern Accounting: Streamlining the Month-End Close

Modern Accounting: The Impact of Investing in Accounts Receivable

Modern Accounting: Driving Sustainability

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Modern Accounting: Streamlining the Month-End Close

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This is a guest post from our partner BlackLine, explaining how to streamline and optimize the month-end close procedss.

What Is the Month-End Close Process?

The month-end close process is the series of activities accounting teams must monitor, perform, and review, on a monthly basis, to produce timely, accurate, and complete financial statements and related reporting. While the most important closing period comes at the end of the financial year, most businesses use month-end procedures to accurately track performance—a monthly closing process as part of regular accounting ensures that the numbers are reliable, stable, and accurate.

Why Is Optimizing the Month-End Close Important?

Extra time spent on the month-end close means less time spent on adding value through analysis and business partnering. Optimizing the month-end close will get financial numbers into the hands of leadership sooner to assist with timely analyses and smarter decision-making. Other reasons to optimize include better discipline, more structure, improved controls, more visibility, and reduced risk.

Flowchart for Month-End Close Process

Here is a month-end close process flowchart to visualize some of the key steps and processes.

BlackLine month end flowchart

What Are Month-End Procedures?

While traditionally a lot of the heavy lifting is done during a few peak days, the month-end close process is ongoing throughout the month as transactions are recorded in various systems.

Before reporting, accounting must capture, review, and make adjustments to data from disparate sources, which often include a primary ERP, other ERPs, sub-ledgers, banks, point-of-sale systems, and many others. When results are solidified and reviewed, accounting then reports results to stakeholders including internal management, external shareholders, regulatory bodies, and others.

When accountants think about the month-end close, they’re likely referring to the activities in the middle of the figure above, like substantiating balance sheet accounts, reconciling transactions, recording recurring journal entries, analyzing variances, monitoring critical tasks and controls, and supporting audits. These are the processes that require the most effort. These activities are traditionally performed manually in spreadsheets and stored in difficult to access emails or on shared drives.

How Long Does a Month-End Close Take?

Each company is different, so it’s impossible to say how long your month-end close should take. Surveys and research over the years show the month-end process generally takes between 5-10 days.

However, over the past decade, with help from technology, the close has been getting faster. According to Ventana Research in 2019, “63% of participants indicated their organization completes its monthly close within six business days, up from 53% in 2014, with nearly half (46%) now closing within four business days (the previous rate was 29%).”

Accounting teams face a lot of pressure to close the books fast because executives use the previous month’s financials to make business decisions for the upcoming months and quarters. Ventana Research notes, “Closing faster has value: 62% of those that close within six days say that the information they provide is timely, while only 39% of those that take longer say that.”

However, closing faster can mean a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. For example, using estimates rather than actuals can shave hours or days off your close, but that means your numbers may not be exact, and when it’s time to close the fiscal year, the actuals will still need to be determined. This may end up adding days to your year-end close.

What Are the Steps in the Closing Process?

Again, because all companies are different, there is no perfect month-end close checklist. For example, businesses that sell physical products will have the extra steps of tracking inventory while companies that are service-focused will not. Smaller companies may have fewer accounts while multinationals will have hundreds or thousands. But there are some key items most accounting teams will need and steps they’ll need to follow.

Some of the information accounting teams need to have on hand in order to close the monthly books:

  • Total revenue numbers
  • Bank account information
  • Inventory levels (if applicable)
  • Petty cash total
  • Financial statements
  • Balance sheets
  • Total fixed assets
  • Income and expense accounts
  • General ledger

Common steps in closing the month-end books:

  • Record all incoming cash and accounts receivable
  • Review expenses and accounts payable records
  • Reconcile accounts
  • Review fixed assets
  • Inventory count (if necessary)
  • Collect and review financial documents
  • Prepare financial statements
  • Review all information for accuracy

Best Practices for a Month-End Close Process

When thinking about best practices for the month-end close, you may want to ask yourself these three questions about your month-end close process:

1.     Do I have sufficient visibility into the entire month-end close process?

2.     Have we done all we can to mitigate risk?

3.     Am I paying highly trained professionals to perform remedial tasks?

If you identify challenges based on those questions, you may want to implement some of these month-end close best practices.

Conduct Pre- and Post-close Team Meetings

During pre-close meetings, the team should discuss follow-up items from the previous month’s post-close meeting and determine the current month’s close schedule and timeline. This way everyone is clear on responsibilities and deadlines. You should also determine what staff should do if they run into barriers and how they should communicate any bottlenecks.

In post-close meetings, discuss what worked and what didn’t, and review assigned roles and responsibilities for the next month. Review any lessons learned, any variances or abnormalities, and entertain any proposed changes to the process.

Manage your Time, be Organized, and Communicate Efficiently

Understanding deadlines and schedules is critical so you can work toward an ideal close date. Being organized will help you stay on track. In addition, accountants must begin to cultivate strong written communication skills with the ability to think critically. They will also need strong oral communication skill and the ability to convey pertinent financial information to executive teams and stakeholders.

Build Relationships

Exceptional accountants know how to manage numbers and people. That requires cultivating a broader range of relationship skills today, such as how to work in a team and how to engage with other departments. If other departments are aware of what you are doing and what you’ll need for each month-end in advance, they may be more willing to contribute the financial data you need on time.

Take Advantage of Automation

Refocus your teams on analysis by replacing repetitive, spreadsheet-heavy work with leading-practice automation. Centralize data and close activities, automate journal entries and reconciliations, strengthen controls, and enhance visibility.

Common Challenges in a Month-End Close Process

Some challenges finance and accounting teams encounter when performing a manual close process include:

  • Team members don’t know what needs to be done and/or what is already completed
  • Inaccurate or incomplete data
  • Lack of standardization
  • Processes that are not clearly defined
  • Discrepancies between numbers
  • Delayed reconciliations due to errors, adjustments, and reclassifications
  • Lack of real-time data that results in little or no visibility and transparency

These challenges during the month-end close are likely why nearly 70% of CAOs recognize a need to change. The month-end close process relies on many people, technology, processes, and other inputs. As a result, accounting organizations are challenged by inconsistent data and processes and a lack of standardization across the enterprise—all while depending on spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings to bring it all together.

As business leaders look for accounting to provide more real time insights, and while regulatory environments are increasingly complex, it becomes even more difficult for accounting to do it all on time without compromising compliance or control. Traditional manual accounting processes are simply not sustainable.

Transitioning away from manual workflows will give you access to one of the most efficient tools you’ll ever use: accounting automation.

How Financial Close Automation Technology Improves the Closing Process

In order to optimize the month-end close process, companies should embrace technology and innovation that enables transformation. Integrated solutions that address more than one aspect of the close process, and in particular, cloud solutions, are helping companies make the move to modern accounting—bit by bit. Let’s take a closer look at how automation technology improves the financial close process.

While there’s no one size fits all approach, many successful accounting organizations begin their optimization journey with close management by unifying data and processes and driving better accountability through visibility. Technology can be used to capture all tasks and embed workflow and segregation of duties. Leading solutions also help centralize supporting documents and provide dashboards for reporting on status and KPI’s.

Optimizing balance sheet substantiation and high-volume reconciliation processes is a natural next step, as preparing, reviewing, and retaining account reconciliations is a common pain point for accounting, and valuable resources spend a disproportionate amount of time on repetitive tasks like ticking and tying.

Technology not only standardizes account reconciliations using templates but improves continuity by embedding policies and procedures, reduces risk by importing general ledger account balances and other data directly from source systems, and drives efficiency by automating matching activities and up to 80% of certifications.

Another way to optimize the financial close is by addressing the journal entry process. Many organizations record hundreds, if not thousands of journal entries each month. Technology not only centralizes the journal entry process with workflow and integration to related balance sheet reconciliations but automates the creation, posting, and certification of a significant portion of a company’s entries. Harmonizing the process and supporting documentation in the cloud not only saves time during the close but also reduces audit testing and preparation.

Finally, intercompany accounting and governance is another area ripe for transformation, as it poses numerous challenges for accounting with complex regulatory requirements and cross-functional dependencies involving legal, tax, and other stakeholders. Accounting can use technology to proactively govern their intercompany process from transaction initiation through netting and settlement. End-to-end intercompany solutions facilitate the process with defined workflows, embedded controls, and automation.

This blog post was originally published on the BlackLine blog.

Read more about Modern Accounting:

Modern Accounting: The Impact of Investing in Accounts Receivable

Modern Accounting: Driving Sustainability

Modern Accounting: Why Does Intercompany Accounting Crash Your Close?


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Modern Accounting: The Impact of Investing in Accounts Receivable

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This is a guest blog post from our partner BlackLine, explaining how to gain confidence cash flow.

Historically, accounts receivable (AR) has been the victim of a lack of investment from a technological perspective. Primarily, this lack of investment in AR is the result of something simple: a misunderstanding.

AR is largely regarded as a necessary but transactional back-office function and not something that creates a “value-add” for the business. Unlike the core accounting of bookkeeping, AR’s reputation is that of a kind of conveyor belt. Necessary, but low impact in the grand scheme of things. As a result, AR is the victim of fundamental misunderstandings regarding how it can be optimized—and the business impact that the right optimization can have.

When finance professionals think about how to streamline or optimize AR, typically it has been viewed as something that may be better offshored or that the ERP already handles. This is due to it being largely manual, time-consuming, and often transactional. But this simply moves the problem elsewhere, rather than solving the underlying issue.

Investing in technology that automates the accounts receivable function grants you complete visibility over the flow of cash into your business, in real-time. The data, intelligence, and real-time oversight of working capital that optimized AR offers to businesses are invaluable, for several key reasons.

Unlocking Working Capital

Applying customer payments to customer accounts quickly and accurately is the cornerstone of successful AR. However, manual processes lead to significant delays in unlocking crucial cash flow.

Money owed by customers is one of the largest assets on any balance sheet. A recent report by PwC estimated that the amount of working capital held hostage in this way is an enormous €1.2 trillion globally. According to PwC, releasing this cash would be enough for global companies to boost their capital investment by 55%, without the need to look externally for funding or put their cash flow under unnecessary pressure. With interest rates as they are right now, never mind what might be on the horizon, looking internally to find opportunities to streamline cash flow and payment processes is a no-brainer.

Let me give you an example: on average, organizations are paid on day 50-55. For a business with $500m revenue, each day is worth $2m. By automating and optimizing payment processes, businesses can potentially release a significant amount of cash into the bottom line that can then be put to work in the business.

Releasing cash from receivables is the quickest and cheapest way to more working capital, yet organizations continue to rely on manual processes which don’t provide proper visibility and tie up cash for far longer than necessary. Investing in AR frees up more working capital, which means stronger business resilience and enables more effective decision-making. Put simply, it puts much more power in your hands and leaves much less up to guesswork.

Maintaining Lasting Customer Relationships

Credit controllers used to be a lot more persistent. This was clear in the terminology they used. They looked at customers as “debtors.” This sounds more akin to something you’d read in a Dickens novel than the way a business refers to its trusted partners.

The way you treat your customers not only reflects your efficiency internally but crucially shapes perceptions, both for potential new customers and those who might be on the fence about jumping ship. Chasing a customer for a payment that was made days before, simply because you’re reliant on manual processes that don’t give you proper visibility, could reflect poorly on your organization. Aside from the wasted time and effort, receiving an erroneous demand for payment on a bad day could be the difference between a continued relationship and a swift parting of ways.

Customers provide the value for our organizations. It’s our customers that are going to support us through the tough times. A mindset shift is required here at all levels of business, including the C-suite. Customers should be treated with the same respect when they owe money as when they don’t. Investing in AR creates the visibility over customer payment behaviors that is essential to this.

The right solution can unlock decision intelligence by removing time-consuming and error-prone processes involved in preparing, transforming, and visualizing data. This lets your teams make more informed decisions around credit risk policies, collection strategies, or credit limit increases to create greater value for the business. It can help you gain visibility into customer behavior changes. This could unlock opportunities for you to work with customers to solve payment challenges before they become a major problem, or increase their line of credit and in turn, your revenue. This can improve profitability by reducing the financial risks posed by write-offs and late payments.

Creating greater visibility over real-time payments allows you to leave the war of attrition over unpaid invoices behind. This leads to a more customer-centric approach to credit, collections, and complaints that can help you to maintain good customer relationships.

Retaining Talent for a Competitive Advantage

In an increasingly competitive business environment, the ability to attract and retain top talent is crucial to business success. A recent survey commissioned by BlackLine suggests that one of the first steps finance and accounting needs to take to retain their best workers is to eliminate transactional, mundane work. More than a quarter (28%) of FP&A professionals surveyed said there weren’t opportunities to learn new skills because transactional work takes up so much time, while a similar number (26%) claimed that they had become bored of the mundane, repetitive nature of their jobs. What’s more, a quarter (26%) also claimed not to have time to focus on future career development.

It’s clear that your talent wants to spend their time adding value, regardless of function. Completing a long list of manual tasks, which could be automated, is not adding value. If 80% of your time is spent on routine tasks that can be automated, that’s 80% of your value gone before any major or strategic tasks arise. This wasted energy wastes your employees, which passes on up the chain. 

Automation frees up F&A team members to focus on strategic, more career-focused goals, ensuring their motivation and energy is spent bringing value to your business (and not someone else’s).

Don’t Let Manual Processes Decide Your Fate

Many organizations have now automated processes such as accounts payable, but the prevalence of manual processes in accounts receivable continues to pose serious health issues for businesses. The problem is that automating some processes and not others could ultimately cost you more than you bargained for. If the budget only stretches so far, it’s essential to upgrade the process that will have the biggest impact. Let me explain by way of an analogy.

Imagine you need to dig a hole somewhere in your back garden. You could do it with a shovel, but it needs to be a very large hole, so doing it that way would take a huge amount of time and exhausting effort. So, you hire a contractor with the right equipment. This gets the job done much faster and with much less effort. The problem is, you didn’t know where exactly to dig the hole to begin with and you’ve dug it in the wrong place. Now, not only do you still need to dig the hole, but you need to repair the large area of back garden that is now a building site.

Automating some FP&A processes but leaving AR up to manual processes creates a similarly traumatic scenario. Choosing to invest in accounts receivable opens up a treasure trove of intelligence and profitability that could make the difference between success or failure. When it comes to accounts receivable, investment is no longer a nice-to-have, it is now a must-have for survival.

Read more about Modern Accounting:

Modern Accounting: Driving Sustainability

Modern Accounting: Why Does Intercompany Accounting Crash Your Close?

Modern Accounting: Four Key Ways AR Automations Propel Financial Operations

This blog post was originally published on the BlackLine blog.

https://www.blackline.com/blog/investing-in-ar-essential-for-survival

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Modern Accounting: 6 Essential Qualities for Surviving the Robot Uprising in Accounting

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This is a guest blog post from our partner BlackLine, explaining how you could be more productive with fewer resources, less overtime, and also easily improve the quality of your work.

As accounting and finance professionals, you do so much more than just handle money matters—you’re also critical for creating strategy and driving process improvements across the entire organization.

But if the majority of your days are spent manually reconciling accounts and matching transactions, little time is left for these bigger picture activities.

What if you could be more productive with fewer resources, less overtime, and also easily improve the quality of your work? Not only would you be pleased with this improvement, but it would set you apart in the industry.

Optimizing Your F&A People

Your accounting and finance professionals are at the heart of your organization’s innovation, and crucial to driving strategy and future business growth. But according to a recent BlackLine survey conducted by Censuswide, many mid-sized and large company decision-makers are not fully leveraging this talent.

Manual processes and tedious tasks take up too much time and result in this invaluable skillset being widely underutilized. To unlock the value of your people, begin by automating the manual accounting work that consumes so much of accountants’ time and effort.

When manual processes are automated, accounting and finance teams spend fewer hours on transactional activities. The focus shifts to analyzing the data and reports, and addressing only the exceptions.

This enables everyday accountants to become exceptional accountants, providing high-value services in areas like fraud detection, compliance, data analytics, technology, and business advice.

What Is an Exceptional Accountant?

When you are only researching the anomalies, you can finally refocus on providing strategic guidance to the business, such as improving internal processes or finding cost-saving opportunities. In other words, the added time allows you to apply not just your knowledge and expertise, but your nuanced creativity and intelligence as well.

According to Helen Brand, chief executive of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), “To succeed as a professional accountant…a vastly different set of skills is required than was necessary just 10 short years ago. And in the next decade, things are likely to change even faster and more dramatically as the global economy continues to evolve at an ever-quickening pace.”

So, what does the exceptional accountant of tomorrow need to cultivate today? Think mastering communication, not macros. Strategic aptitude, instead of being spreadsheet savvy.

In short, capabilities that enable you to deliver predictive insights to leadership, drive data-based decisions and provide expert counsel. 

6 Skills You Need to Become an Exceptional Accountant

These six skills needed for accounting work in unison to serve as building blocks to exceptional accountant status.

1. Analytical Skills

For the finance function, providing leadership with historical data used to be quite sufficient. Yet today, companies also expect to have access to predictive data.

For today’s accountants, this requires knowing how to turn Big Data into concise, decision-driving insights. Vanguard businesses are already hiring accountant/data scientists. Accountants looking toward the future must have both a theoretical and practical understanding of data and analytics.

2. Communication Skills

It’s said ad nauseam: it’s the Age of Information. Yet all this information is just noise if it’s not shared effectively. The exceptional accountant of tomorrow won’t just know why data looks like it does (analytical skills); she’ll also be able to skillfully convey those insights to others.

Accountants must begin to cultivate strong written communication skills: the ability to think critically and translate those thoughts into compelling documents. They will also need strong oral communication skills: the ability to convey pertinent financial information to executive teams and stakeholders.

3. Relationship Skills

During the “good ole days,” an accountant could hide in the back office, subsisting on a few basic greetings at the legendary water cooler.

Yet thriving in tomorrow’s business is going to take more than water cooler-level conversational skills. As automation streamlines transactional tasks, accountants won’t have the “millions of transactions to match” excuse to sidestep human interaction.

The exceptional accountant of the future will know how to manage numbers and people. That requires cultivating a broader range of relationship skills today, such as how to work in a team, how to motivate and engage employees, and how to deliver bad news — without making somebody cry.

4. Creativity

It used to be that nobody wanted a “creative” accountant. But in an era when businesses must quickly identify opportunities while simultaneously mitigating risk, a finance professional who can think outside of the proverbial box is a strategic asset.

Accountants who can combine creativity with a deep understanding of the company’s financial capabilities will be able to solve complex financial—and non-financial—problems faster and more cost-effectively.

5. Business Acumen

Contributing to the business on a strategic level requires more than just an understanding of the numbers. Accountants also need to understand the business as a whole. The ability to provide counsel to the C-suite requires seeing the big picture, from how each functional area works to the best way to acquire and retain talent.

When accountants have the opportunity for stretch assignments, cross-training, and job-sharing, it’s easier to understand—and make decisions based upon—the holistic interplay between a company’s services, employees, customers, and stakeholders.

6. Tech Savvy

Technology isn’t just changing every job function; technology itselfchanges rapidly. Instead of expecting to use the same tool for the next decade, accountants today must be ready to use new technology every year. This requires not just a basic understanding of technology itself, but the ongoing cultivation of flexibility andadaptability.

Benefits of Developing Your F&A Professionals

Today more than ever, companies need finance and accounting professionals who can transcend traditional number crunching. Yet for accountants, making the transition from spreadsheet jockey to strategic expert requires new skills.

Your people are the ones who redesign your processes, and therefore it is essential to encourage, help develop, and hire for a different set of skills needed for accounting. This is the most difficult hurdle to clear because there is so much inertia, with the biggest battle being the comfortable, fixed mindset of “this is the way it’s always been done.”

The tactic to overcoming this is to create buy-in for the Continuous Accounting approach and get your people on board with your vision. For this to be successful, your Continuous Accounting strategy must clearly point to your end goal as an organization, along with a blueprint of achievable milestones.

Fundamentally, Continuous Accounting is a story about unleashing the accounting and finance professionals who have unparalleled vision to experiment, push the limits, try and fail. When you allow your people to drive change, they deliver things that scale in a very exciting way.

And it all begins with empowering your teams with the skills needed for Accounting to propel the entire organization into the future.

Accountants who cultivate business acumen can begin to provide guidance relevant to the entire company, not just the finance department.

Nurturing creativity leads to innovative solutions for some of the biggest challenges in business today, from the unexpected corner of accounting.

Developing analytical capabilities ensures the accounting function can deliver true insight, not just historical information, while building communication and relationship skills guarantee those insights aren’t lost in translation.

Finally, because technology will continue to change at light speed, accountants who not only have basic IT skills but also flexibility and adaptability will always be ready to integrate new, more efficient tools into existing processes.

Read more Modern Accounting blogs:

Modern Accounting: Changing the Culture in Accounts Receivable

Auto-Certification Rules for Balance Sheet Reconciliations in BlackLine

Workflow Capabilities for Balance Sheet Reconciliations in BlackLine

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Modern Accounting: How to Approach Intercompany Recharging

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This is a guest blog post from our partner BlackLine, explaining best practice recommendations for managing expenses across various business centers within your company.

What Is Intercompany Recharging?

What exactly is a recharge in the world of accounting? It essentially involves providing a good or service to an entity and recovering the cost from the entity served on a fee basis. Intercompany recharging happens when one entity incurs a cost and then bills, invoices, or moves that cost to another entity in the larger organization. The goal is to accurately charge the entity that received the value of the good or service provided.

Notable examples of intercompany recharging occur when shared services, IT and telecom, or any costs that are centralized must be billed to their ultimate beneficiaries across the corporation. For example, charges for phone, computer, and networking usually come from vendors in one comprehensive invoice. That invoice might be paid by corporate, but corporate would have to split the invoice and “recharge” portions of the bill to the entities in the organization that used the service.

Two Different Approaches to Intercompany Recharging

Broadly speaking, intercompany recharging can be handled in one of two ways:

The very detailed allocation model involves getting down to a per head cost with each line in an invoice allocated to the specific person or project it served. That cost, such as a mobile phone expense, is charged to whatever entity that person rolls-up to in the organization.

Challenges with this model occur when an individual doesn’t align easily to a single entity or when personnel changes happen within the organization. For example, people change roles, the billing or accounting information changes, or the organizational structure itself adjusts.

The more generic allocation model involves setting a cost per person and allocating that figure to intercompany entities based on the number of people allocated to that entity. For example, a percentage of costs would be allocated based on headcount regardless of whether the people used the billed product or service.

The challenge with this method is that it results in many disputes. Arguments arise because people disagree with how costs were allocated to their group. For example, a French entity might argue that their telecom costs are cheaper than the US or that only a portion of their team were given access. Then charges must be debated.

How to Decide Which Approach to Intercompany Recharging Is Best

When deciding which approach to intercompany recharging is best for your organization, consider three things.

1. Understand the organization’s risk tolerance. 

This will help determine how precise to be. Risk averse companies will want their intercompany recharging to be more detailed to give them more support on how they allocate. Everything would be easy to trace back and serve as proof in the event of an inquiry or audit. Less risk averse companies, on the other hand, would take a more simplistic approach and might not be as concerned about how the costs are moved around.

2. Consider the organization’s cost tolerance.

How much it is willing to spend on being precise? This typically depends on where the business is in its evolutionary cycle. If it’s prospering and doesn’t believe it needs to worry about every detail on every line, then it won’t. But if the belief is that the organization needs to watch every cost, then the intercompany recharging will be broken down to the finest details.

3. Determine what the organization can operationalize and maintain. 

Find the sweet spot that provides enough detail that a consistent process can be maintained month over month or quarter over quarter. Intercompany involves many functions which might limit what is possible. It all depends on those who are actually touching the data and reconciling it. There may be technology constraints where the systems can’t handle all the data coming in. The account reconciliation team may not be able to handle the volume of transactions, and the people inputting the information can also become overwhelmed.

The Trend Toward More Detailed Allocation & Greater Transparency

Intercompany recharging practices are moving toward more detailed allocation and greater transparency. This contrasts with how the recharging process has been addressed historically, when companies simply threw people at the problem or employed front end technology overlaid with workflows.

Backend technology, such as spreadsheets or reports, have also been used to reconcile accounts. However, this is more reactive than proactive, and usually happens after the fact when the accounting team is trying to reconcile everything together.

Do It Once, Do It Right

The benefits of doing it right include fewer intercompany disconnects, which result in a more accurate and timelier close. Ensuring transaction allocations are correct before they are booked also eliminates last-minute conversations with people trying to work out where disconnects happened and why. There is less chaos and churn. And if issues do arise, they can be resolved faster because teams can quickly see where disconnects exist.

The intercompany recharging methodology that BlackLine specializes in eliminates disconnects, booking both sides of the transaction at the same time. It also gives visibility to that data to deliver an understanding of what is billed, and what is being billed for. This process also enables good reporting. This is how BlackLine provides full transparency into the intercompany recharging process.

Read more Modern Accounting blogs:

Modern Accounting: Using AR Automation to Boost Cash Flow

Modern Accounting: Achieving Finance Transformation

Modern Accounting: Easier Intercompany Transactions

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Modern Accounting: Achieving Finance Transformation

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This is a guest blog post from our partner BlackLine, explaining four essential steps for transformation success.

Making the Move to F&A Digital Transformation

For controllers, CFOs, CTOs, and business leaders in general, planning a move to digital finance transformation can be daunting—and it can raise some serious concerns. What if, for example, the transformation causes more problems than it solves in the intermediate term? What if it adds interim state technical complexities to an already challenging ecosystem further challenging the partnership between finance and IT?

Mike Polaha, BlackLine senior vice president finance solutions and technology, has seen these and other issues arise in his time working with global organizations. Digital transformation has been proven to deliver significant benefits, he notes, but the keys to success are in the preparation and being smart with the ways you organize and sequence the strategy and work plans.

4 Steps to Finance Transformation While Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Base Your Strategy on Diagnostics

Your strategy and corresponding business case should have a clear goal, and that goal should be informed by benchmarks of similar companies in the affected finance processes.

“You don’t want your strategy to be informed by hunches,” says Polaha. Instead, it’s good to use an outside consulting group—the Hackett Group, for example, or some other company with a benchmarking service—to see where you currently stand, then focus your strategy to gain the greatest competitive advantage at maximum efficiency.

Benchmarking can also be critical in selling the transformation to executive management.

“It can help you show executive leaders how, by making certain investments, you can not only improve your cost to serve, but likewise how the service can be differentiated in what it can now provide,” he says. “You’re more finitely tethering the functional investment to the overall business strategies.”

Adopt a Leading-Practice Orientation

Polaha notes, “every company is unique, of course, but all companies share certain fundamental characteristics. Once a company realizes this, it’s able to benefit by looking at, and emulating, industry leading practices.”

 Here is where a relationship with a top-end system integrator like Deloitte or EY can pay dividends.

“These companies have lots of experience with finance transformation,” he says. “They can show you a well-documented way of adopting best-practice processes for your specific areas of concentration.

“Also, BlackLine can help implement leading practice solutions based on our own experiences with customer installations and our regular participation in customer advisory boards. In essence, our application is crowdsourced by enabling best practice inherent in the composition of our solution design.”

Admit You’re Not a Software Company & Embrace the Cloud

According to Polaha, “too many companies think that they can develop their own applications. The problem is they first have to build the applications, and then they have to maintain and upgrade them. Then typically at some point they start to fall behind and can’t catch up.”

An example is one company that tried to upgrade their intercompany reconciliations by customizing their ERP software. “It then became very difficult, and costly, for them to implement vendor upgrades without the fear of breaking everything they’d developed.”

Using the cloud can help speed application deployments and allow companies to digitize rapidly at scale. The company also avails itself to a future proof architecture by allowing the SaaS provider to continually embed the latest evolutions in process and solution capability.

Polaha notes, “there are times when companies have too many applications with significant overlap. It’s better to partner with fewer vendors that can use the cloud to cover multiple applications.

“If you’re using one finance vendor for account reconciliations and another to do cash application for accounts receivable, it’s much more efficient to give those jobs to a single, cloud-based vendor to simplify the overall technological and contractual footprint.”

Harmonize Finance Data with the Enterprise

Here’s where finance can be an evangelist and a valuable partner to IT.

Data analytics are growing in popularity as a tool for business planning, but Polaha notes that analytics are only effective when they’re based on data that’s harmonized—unified—so that all data uses common, standardized naming and formatting conventions.

As an example, today’s finance groups are making increasing use of analytics-driven rolling forecasts that produce continuous predictions based on the previous time period’s data. Rolling forecasts can be very effective planning tools, says Polaha, but only if they are based on harmonized data.

“The problem is that without harmonized data, some people will be basing their planning instances on their unique views of the data. So, you end up with 50 instances of planning and forecasting software, and you can’t put Humpy Dumpty back together again.”

Once finance has harmonized its own data, it can then become an evangelist for data harmonization across the enterprise.

“Finance can then present a common view of finance data to IT,” says Polaha. “IT can use that for further harmonizing their own data and applications,” he says.

“That’s the ultimate prize for transformation, isn’t it? To get finance, IT, and the entire enterprise moving smoothly into a digital future.”

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Extending Revelwood’s Office of Finance Offerings with BlackLine

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These are exciting times here at Revelwood! We’ve spent the past 25 years working with the Office of Finance on enterprise planning – specifically, designing and implementing solutions based on IBM Planning Analytics, Workday Adaptive Planning, and our own accelerator tools and utilities.

We are now extending our expertise and services to include the BlackLine Continuous Accounting Platform. It is a cloud-based, modern accounting solution that delivers:

  • Accounting Reconciliations
  • AR Intelligence
  • Cash Application
  • Compliance
  • Journal Entry
  • Intercompany Hub
  • Smart Close
  • Task Management
  • Transaction Matching
  • Variance Analysis

“Revelwood is committed to bringing only the best software solutions to the Office of Finance,” said Lisa Minneci, vice president of marketing. “BlackLine’s approach to the financial close and modern accounting is a natural fit for our mission.”

BlackLine offers consumable solutions to the traditional, manual close process that help companies transform into modern accounting organizations. The company has 3,400+ customers with more than 300,000 users. Its customers include:

  • GoodRx
  • Scotts Miracle-Gro
  • SiriusXM
  • Zurich North America
  • Zendesk
  • CNI Industrial
  • The Hershey Company
  • Red Wing Shoes
  • eBay and more

“Revelwood has seasoned consultants and experts in the Office of Finance who offer strategic guidance, deep technical skills and relevant expertise that extends our reach significantly and enables a much more rapid deployment of the BlackLine solution,” said Jess Tan, regional vice president, Software Cloud Alliances and Solution Provider Channel at BlackLine. “By adding BlackLine to Revelwood’s best-of-breed partner portfolio, Revelwood clients get a solution that we believe will deliver visible ROI. We look forward to a very collaborative go-to-market approach with Revelwood.”

Stay tuned for more news about our new partnership with BlackLine!

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