BlackLine

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

July 14, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

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.

Modern Accounting: How to Approach Intercompany Recharging

June 30, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

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.

Modern Accounting: Achieving Finance Transformation

May 26, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

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.”

Extending Revelwood’s Office of Finance Offerings with BlackLine

July 13, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

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!

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

Optimizing Your F&A People

What Is an Exceptional Accountant?