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Fluence Technologies

Ventana: Continuous Accounting Helps Companies Close Faster

March 23, 2023 by Revelwood

Ventana Research, an authoritative and respected market research and advisory services firm, recently looked at Revelwood’s partner Fluence Technologies and how the company helps organizations automate tasks for faster monthly, quarterly and annual closing. 

According to Ventana, by 2025 two-thirds of midsized organizations will have applied continuous accounting principles to close their monthly books within one business week. A key objective of continuous accounting is achieving a fast, clean close. 

This is part of a larger digital transformation of accounting departments, which aims to eliminate manual tasks such as consolidations and reconciliations by using software automation. 

The firm’s Smart Close Dynamic Insights report shows:

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  • 56% of organizations close their month within six business days 
  • 40% of organizations complete their quarterly close in six business days
  • 69% of those that automate all most of the close process complete the quarterly close within six days
  • Only 29% of companies that only use some or no software automation close within that six-day window

Ventana states, “Financial executives who are committed to enabling their finance organization to play a more strategic role in their company should focus on ways to streamline their close process.”

Read the full piece on continuous accounting and Fluence Technologies.

Read more about Fluence Technologies:

FP&A Done Right: The Role of Narrative Reporting in ESG

Fluence Technologies Earns “Outstanding” Overall BPM Pulse Rating from BPM Partners

Home » Fluence Technologies

Filed Under: Financial Close & Consolidation Tagged With: financial close, Financial Close and Consolidation, Financial Performance Management, fluence, Fluence Technologies

Modernizing Financial Close and Consolidation with Best-of-Breed Corporate Performance Management Solutions

March 9, 2023 by Revelwood

This is a guest post from Michael Morrison, CEO of Fluence Technologies, a partner of Revelwood. 

Ask an artist to show you what a tree looks like and they might create a beautiful painting that shows a maple tree’s leaves changing from green to orange and yellow at the height of autumn.

If you ask a scientist the same question, they’re more likely to walk through a detailed breakdown about the genus and species to which they belong, how tall they’ll grow and where they tend to thrive.

Now imagine you have to make a strategic business decision about trees: though both of them are valuable, it’s pretty easy to see why the scientist would become your preferred source of expertise. Some disciplines may be a mix of art and science, but others are more clear-cut. The differences between financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and financial consolidation are a perfect case in point.

The strategic roadmaps FP&A teams develop for their organizations could be considered an art in the sense that they involve studying data in the context of organizational objectives and finding insights that will chart a successful path forward. While the results need to be firmly grounded in fact, there’s some creativity involved.

“Creative” financial consolidation, on the other hand, is of no help to anyone in an organization, especially its leadership team. When companies consolidate and close the books using manual, ad-hoc processes, they risk introducing errors, inconsistencies and wind up taking accounting teams more time than they should. Instead of a clear representation of where the business stands, the result is more like an abstract painting that’s difficult to interpret.

Financial consolidation needs the rigor of science because it provides the foundation on which all the creative thinking is built. This includes budgeting and planning, but also identifying growth opportunities and operational efficiencies.

Perhaps even more importantly, financial consolidation is key to meeting reporting requirements, where the accuracy of balances, journal entries and intercompany matching is essential to a successful audit.

With these kinds of requirements in mind, it’s no wonder growing companies often struggle to choose the right technology solutions. This is where a best-of-breed approach provides functionality with flexibility to address the needs of those involved in both financial consolidation and FP&A.  

A Brief History Of Best of Breed

Anyone who has ever gone camping with a Swiss Army knife can appreciate the versatility of an all-in-one platform.

When you’re spending time in the woods, for instance, a Swiss Army knife has the advantages of being small to pack, light to carry and containing all the tools you might need during your trip. This not only includes a blade for cutting but a tiny magnifying glass, a corkscrew and even a fork.

Once you’re back at home, though, using the fork in a Swiss Army knife for eating at your dining room table feels almost ridiculous. Instead, we turn to what might be called a best-of-breed fork – a utensil that was built specifically with a single purpose in mind.

Something similar has been going on within organizations that originally standardized many of their business functions on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. This is the Swiss Army knife of software, handling not only accounting but procurement, project management, supply chain operations, payroll and more.

An ERP might be fine if the company using it never bought another firm, or if it decided never to expand into other markets or add more customers. The reality is that M&As often lead to a single company owning multiple ERPs, complicating financial consolidation by requiring deep integration and fine-tuning.

“Best-of-breed” can be defined in many ways, but think of it as technology that is purpose-built to do one job really well. You’ll recognize these solutions because they tend to be:

  • Cloud-based: Traditional, on-premise solutions tend to lock companies into features that become difficult to update or change. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) financial consolidation solutions make data more accessible while providing a streamlined upgrade path.
  • Out-of-the-Box: Instead of bringing on an army of consultants to set up and deploy them, best-of-breed solutions can be set up in far less time, with key functionality ready to be used immediately.
  • User-centric: An ERP might be designed with almost every business function in mind. A best-of-breed solution hones in on the specific needs and challenges of a particular team or set or role. In this case, it means finance and accounting professionals will see features that align with their ideal workflow.

Sometimes the prospect of researching and selecting best-of-breed software might seem so daunting that companies are tempted to put it off indefinitely. There’s a risk in doing nothing, however.

Sticking with an all-in-one platform like an ERP (or several of them) means finance and accounting teams might run into consolidation challenges that require them to figure out workarounds – another form of “creativity” with all the risks we walked through earlier in this post.

Maintaining the status quo could also make consolidating, closing the books and reporting on the data more of a chore for already-overworked teams. Companies that want to hold onto these valuable employees (or avoid the threat of “quiet quitting”) should think about what a best-of-breed solution could mean for the employee experience.

Finally, failing to make best-of-breed solutions a priority means you may become less agile, productive and strategic as competitors who opt for more modern technologies to navigate uncertain economic times.

Fortunately, making the shift to best-of-breed finance software isn’t as difficult as you might imagine.

Best Practices For Choosing And Deploying Best-of-Breed Software

Your search for the right best-of-breed financial consolidation and close solution will depend in part on the catalysts that started you on this journey in the first place.

For fast-growing companies, it often stems from a combination of outgrowing tools such as static spreadsheets or facing enough complexity (M&A, international growth, intercompany transactions, etc.) that ERPs no longer make sense.

As you evaluate the options, consider the following principles:

1. Tie Clear Goals To Finance And Accounting Performance KPIs

FP&A and accounting groups already track plenty of metrics, from working capital to net profit margin, compound annual growth rate and beyond. In this case, though, you want to think more about the key performance indicators that demonstrate success among your team members.

These could include time spent completing the financial close, time spent reporting, error rates and more. Make sure you’re not constrained by a platform where the number of scenarios or versions you can work with are limited – you may only close the books once a quarter, but modern FP&A needs to support continuous planning processes. 

Settling on a few of these KPIs – and setting goals to move the needle on them – will ensure you select the right best-of-breed solution for your business.

2. Scope The Full Breadth Of Feature Capabilities That Matter

It’s easy to get used to the way things have always been done in FP&A and close and consolidation. This is an opportunity to dream a little, looking at the functionality that will meet your current needs and those that may come up as your firm continues to grow.

For instance, some of the most burning issues could be integrating data from multiple locations and subsidiaries, or consolidating and reporting financial results across multiple hierarchies. 

Over time, though, you may also want to think about how your potential solution can streamline the dissemination of financial data into board books, dashboards and other forms of reporting to help key stakeholders. The right product should also assist with what-if analysis for those doing the “creative” work in FP&A.

3. Assess Current And Future Finance Data Complexity

Regulatory compliance is an ever-evolving beast, as is the nature of what guides strategic direction in a company. Best-of-breed technologies should therefore offer a seamless way to bring together both financial and non-financial data to create a more comprehensive picture of business performance.

Why non-financial data? Because a true best-of-breed solution supports company-wide planning, where line-of-business leaders and their teams can adapt models to reflect their specific goals and allow them to easily collaborate with other functional groups. 

Factor in variables such as having to contend with multiple languages, multiple currencies and any planned M&As or growth tactics will affect the chart of accounts you’ll need to manage.

And of course, all this should come with strong security and a complete audit trail. Data integrity is not a nice-to-have. It’s essential.

4. Determine The Degree Of Finance Ownership

Given the technical nature of ERP and similar enterprise-grade software, it has traditionally been up to IT departments to procure and make changes to the technologies used by finance departments. Cloud-based platforms today should require less oversight and intervention by the CIO’s team, however. Instead, accounting and FP&A groups should steer the overall roadmap for which new features should be turned on (and when), as well as any changes to business processes like the monthly close.

A good example is reporting: best-of-breed platforms should mean an end to the days when IT had to help finance teams develop reports. Instead, self-service reporting capabilities should support the development of ad hoc reporting so the company can respond to changes with intelligence and speed. 

Calculating Best-of-Breed ROI And Next Steps

Automation should always accomplish a few key objectives. It should bring speed and simplicity to otherwise difficult or complex processes. It should position employees to focus more on the tasks that make the best use of their time, experience and expertise. And it should create greater standardization and consistency as it offers more trustworthy data for the business’s strategic use.

Best-of-breed financial consolidation and close software can tick all of these boxes, and many more. The return on investment should be based in part on factors such as:

  • The ability of the solution to scale with the business
  • The ongoing development of more sophisticated features tied to user needs
  • The ease with which the platform can work with related solutions and technologies
  • The ability to answer increasingly complex questions

The shift to best-of-breed finance software is also not one fast-growing companies have to make on their own. Watch this on-demand webinar by Fluence and Revelwood, where we go into more detail about actionable steps that will help you reduce the time to value and reap the biggest benefits.

This blog post was originally published on the Fluence Technologies blog.

Read more about Financial Close and Consolidation:

Nucleus Research Finds 50 – 150% ROI on Financial Consolidation and Close Solutions

FP&A Done Right: The Role of Narrative Reporting in ESG

Fluence Technologies Earns “Outstanding” Overall BPM Pulse Rating from BPM Partners

Home » Fluence Technologies

Filed Under: Financial Close & Consolidation Tagged With: financial close, financial close software, fluence, Fluence Technologies

Nucleus Research Finds 50 – 150% ROI on Financial Consolidation and Close Solutions

January 26, 2023 by Revelwood

Nucleus Research has determined that SMBs can expect a “payback period of 12 months and an average annual ROI of 50 to 150 percent within the first three years of deployment” for financial consolidation and close solutions. 

The analyst firm is a global provider of ROI-focused technology research and advisory services. According to Nucleus, “Midsized companies contend with the same accounting complexities of large enterprises with multiple business units spreads across various geographies and industries, but often lack the budget and bandwidth for a drawn-out implementation.” These companies turn to midmarket financial consolidation and close solutions to “migrate off disjointed Excel processes while lowering the technical and cost barriers of traditional enterprise technology.” 

Nucleus defines financial consolidation and close (FCC) solutions as “covering the consolidation and reporting of financial information for the monthly, quarterly, and annual close … [they] help organizations streamline daily tasks for accountants, controllers, and the CFO.” 

Furthermore, Nucleus explains that “midmarket companies deploy an FCC system when they have difficulty meeting compliance requirements, reporting actuals on a timely basis, evaluating the progress of accounting processes, and visibility to financials across their various functional departments, sales channels, and subsidiaries.”

Download the report today to learn about the benefits of FCC solutions, including:

  • Productivity
  • Cost reductions
  • Revenue drivers
  • Organization visibility
  • Culture and morale

The report also covers the total cost of ownership (TCO) of FCC solutions.

This report is courtesy of Revelwood’s partner, Fluence Technologies.

Read more about Financial Close & Consolidation:

Fluence Technologies Earns “Outstanding” Overall BPM Pulse Rating from BPM Partners

Financial Close & Consolidation: The Vital Need for Automating Accounting

Modern Accounting: Adjusting Journal Entries

Home » Fluence Technologies

Filed Under: Financial Close & Consolidation Tagged With: financial close, financial close software, fluence, Fluence Technologies

FP&A Done Right: The Role of Narrative Reporting in ESG

October 14, 2022 by Revelwood

ESG (environmental, social, governance) reporting is the talk of the Office of Finance. Does our company need to start thinking about ESG? When do we need to start reporting on our ESG efforts? And most importantly, how do we do this?

There are many approaches: leveraging existing investments in planning software and data analytics, relying on home-grown solutions, purchasing new, purpose-built applications, and more. One aspect of the ESG reporting continuum is that of narrative reporting.

In July 2022, Revelwood’s partner, Fluence Technologies, acquired Sturnis365, a solution for collaborative disclosure management and narrative reporting. “[The Sturnis365 acquisition] complements Fluence’s robust, enterprise financial consolidation, close and reporting solution, enabling time-pressed finance departments to spend more time on analysis while addressing broader mandates for narrative reporting, including internal board books, investor presentations and more stringent ESG reporting,” said Robert Kugel, SVP and Research Director at Ventana Research. 

What is Narrative Reporting?

Narrative reporting goes beyond the numbers – and statutory disclosure – to automate the production and distribution of any internal or external report. It enables you to combine and consolidate financial, operational and external data sources and narrative text components such as management letters and notes to financial statements. It allows for input from multiple contributors from across a business – from auditors to executives.

Fluence states, “Bringing financial and non-financial together through integrated reporting sets you up to tell a more meaningful story about the business … You can tell those stories through an annual report, board books, lender reports or other investor updates.” 

Narrative reporting provides meaning and context to your reports. 

Narrative Reporting and ESG

According to Accenture, 68% of CFOs globally take responsibility for their organization’s ESG performance. ESG reporting encompasses non-financial data that needs to be linked to financial information. ESG metrics can help uncover business opportunities, attract investors and offer a competitive advantage. More and more companies are incorporating ESG concerns into capital allocations and plans. Sustainability is falling under organizations’ enterprise risk management strategy. All of these factors point to the significance and importance of reporting accurately and thoroughly on ESG. But numbers alone won’t tell the story. 

“Organizations need to understand their ESG reporting obligations – today and into the future – and this reporting responsibility typically falls on the Office of Finance,” said Michael Morrison, CEO, Fluence. “At Fluence, we are committed to addressing these ESG reporting needs with our modern consolidation, close and reporting platform.”

Read more in our series on ESG reporting:

FP&A Done Right: Finance’s Role in ESG Reporting

Home » Fluence Technologies

Filed Under: FP&A Done Right Tagged With: Environmental, esg, Fluence Technologies, Planning & Forecasting

Fluence Technologies and Revelwood Enter Strategic Partnership

September 21, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

News & Events

Today we announced a new strategic partnership with Fluence Technologies, the only pure-play provider of financial close and consolidation software purpose-built for mid-sized companies.

“The Office of Finance is charged with many tasks to help their organizations run efficiently and effectively,” said Ken Wolf, CEO, Revelwood. “We have more than 25 years of experience working with finance solutions to improve business performance. By adding Fluence to our best-in-breed software portfolio, we are addressing one more key aspect of financial management – financial consolidations.”

“Fluence may be new to Revelwood, but our teams have worked together for decades,” said Michael Morrison, CEO, Fluence Technologies. “Revelwood’s expertise, strategic vision and passion will help ensure we deliver comprehensive consolidation and performance management systems to our joint clients.”

Fluence Technologies, a leader in the cloud financial close and consolidation space, offers a purpose-built solution that is easily owned and maintained by finance, while also providing the power and functionality of the most robust enterprise solutions.

Read the full press release.

Home » Fluence Technologies

Filed Under: News & Events Tagged With: consolidation software, financial close, financial close software, financial consolidation software, Fluence Technologies, Revelwood partnership

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