Office of Finance

FP&A Done Right: Overcoming Obstacles to Collaboration in the Office of Finance

August 6, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, highlighting how to better improve collaboration in the Office of Finance.

As the role of CFO continues to become more strategic and collaborative, CFOs are expecting their teams to follow suit. As such, many finance leaders are requiring their teams to broaden their understanding of other functions and pushing them to communicate and collaborate more effectively, both internally and externally. According to our studies, collaborative work now consumes a significant portion of the finance team’s week.

The limitations of legacy tech

One of the primary obstacles to better collaboration is outdated technology. With many finance departments still relying on email and spreadsheets to drive their reporting process, collaboration is a time-consuming, frustrating task.

Think about this common scenario: A report identifies a variance and is emailed out to multiple stakeholders for review. This triggers a massive email chain of variance queries, change requests, and edits. Soon you have multiple versions of the spreadsheet existing on different computers. Which one is the right one? And if it’s not saved on the server, who can access it?

Of course, the other issue is accuracy. How does anyone know whether the numbers in the spreadsheet are correct in the first place? Manual-driven processes are susceptible to errors like entering data in the wrong cell, messing up a formula, or adding an extra digit by mistake. As stakeholders copy and paste information into spreadsheets and email them along, you lose the ability to easily track who is entering data or verify where that data originally came from.

The role of nonfinance managers in financial reporting

When some finance departments talk about collaboration, they think about ways of making it easier to collaborate within the department. While that’s important, true collaboration means making it just as easy for nonfinance managers to be able to access and make changes to a report.

Going back to spreadsheets, often the finance department works to get the report perfect before sending it off to an operational manager for review. If the operational manager adds a last-minute update, it can require a massive amount of work to incorporate, review, and verify.

While accurate data is obviously the top priority, something else to consider when collaborating with nonfinance managers is data visualization. Even after you have all the numbers together in a report, a spreadsheet can be difficult to interpret and understand. A report is only as good as the action your team can take from it; to improve collaboration, you must improve both access and understanding of the data.

The 3 steps to making reporting collaborative

If you wish to make your reporting a more collaborative process, here are three keys to keep in mind:

Step 1. Access
Instead of static spreadsheets and email, it’s critical to move your reporting process to the cloud using smart financial reporting software like Workday Adaptive Planning. Because it’s accessible through the web, all your stakeholders can work from the same set of numbers at the same time without confusion or delay. And since you can control and track at the user level who has access and who enters data, you can greatly increase transparency and accountability throughout the reporting process.

Step 2. Ownership
In addition, Workday Adaptive Planning can automatically import data from both your financial and nonfinancial systems. This not only saves time and reduces errors, but it also takes all your data out of departmental silos and brings it together to give your entire company a single source of truth to work from.

Step 3. Understanding
Once you’ve automated data collection, you can focus on delivering insights. Workday Adaptive Planning lets you easily distribute board reports, slice and dice management and financial reports for specific departments, and drill down into the details. Because it’s connected to all your systems, you can also easily create real-time, visually appealing dashboards that give nonfinancial managers instant insight into their department’s performance.

Collaboration is integral to today’s finance initiatives

The marriage of traditional accounting and analytic skills with interpersonal communication and collaboration skills reflects the changing face of today’s finance team and leaders. Data alone is not valuable to today’s organizations. But the ability to aggregate, align, and interpret company-wide data that guides corporate performance continues to separate the traditional from the modern CFO.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

FP&A Done Right: 3 Ways to Improve Collaboration with Colleagues Outside of Finance

July 23, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, explaining how to improve collaboration between the Office of Finance and business managers.

Many companies suffer from poor communication and collaboration between financial and nonfinancial managers. Operating managers don’t have sufficient input or buy-in to the financial planning process, and they aren’t educated about how their decisions can influence overall profitability. For its part, finance isn’t able to offer real performance insights that might truly help managers improve their results.

Instead of working closely together to plan and forecast, finance and business resort to negotiations that can involve high levels of conflict. Why is this, and how can it be changed to strengthen collaboration between finance and the business—and therefore transform FP&A?

Drowning in metrics, measurements, and spreadsheets

First of all, companies sometimes flood managers with measurements and metrics, too few of which effectively help managers understand and improve their performance. Too much measuring can add cost and complexity to an organization.

Secondly, spreadsheets continue to dominate planning processes in most companies. While spreadsheets work well for individual productivity, they cause problems when it comes to sharing and aggregating. Finance gets bogged down in low-value-added work—such as formatting and troubleshooting spreadsheets—and can’t provide useful service to business managers.

Meanwhile, business managers waste time managing to budgets instead of managing their business. They often don’t get the information they need, when they need it, from finance. Instead, they’re deluged with data, metrics, and reports, much of which provides little value.

Furthermore, many planning systems are designed and implemented by finance and are seen as irrelevant by business managers. The result is lack of buy-in and enthusiasm.

Clearing the decks for useful analysis and true collaboration

Finance can make room for higher-value work for both themselves and managers by leading the way to less detail and complexity, simplifying internal systems, and reducing the amount of time managers spend producing counterproductive reports and analyzing too many measurements.

In so doing, finance can provide effective decision support and performance insight that can truly help managers improve their results, making finance a real partner rather than an adversary. Here are three best practices that will help you make these changes.

1. Continuous planning

First, replace detailed annual planning cycles, which take too long and result in a budget that is already out of date as soon as it is complete. A more effective planning system is a continuous process, focused on rolling views that look 12 to 18 months ahead. These continuous plans should enable managers to respond more rapidly to emerging events and trends and to changing business environments.

Replacing the annual budget with a rolling forecast can save huge amounts of work, freeing all managers to spend more time on value-added work. It will also improve the relationship between finance and business managers, as finance will have more time to provide better service.

2. Move from monthly variance reporting to KPIs and dashboards

Most companies manage through annual budgets and use monthly variance reporting as the primary feedback mechanism for managers. But monthly variance reporting is too slow and fails to reveal underlying causes of problems.

What is more effective is fast feedback of financial results, summarized and shown as trends and moving averages. KPIs should act as a management dashboard. They should provide managers with early warning signs when problems are brewing and action needs to be taken.

Defining measurements is just the first step. “The next step, and perhaps the hardest part, is to set in motion a cadence for the management team to know and really understand performance through KPIs so that they can use that knowledge to make the right decisions.

These KPIs should be few in number and appropriate to the level of management. A small number of key metrics should be reported daily and weekly. KPIs should provide a fast, high-level view of what is happening today and what is likely to happen in the short-term future. Moving to KPIs in this fashion will not only provide true value to managers but will also lighten the reporting load for the entire organization.

3. Deploy cloud technology that provides fast, relevant information, enabling collaboration

Finance can use technology to provide a performance management system that delivers what managers need—fast, relevant information. Avoid investing in complex IT systems that consume valuable time and money without providing reasonable value.

Instead, implement a dedicated system that employs cloud-based technology to enable unlimited numbers of managers to work together on driver-based forecasts, which are automatically aggregated at every level. This system should also have tight integration with data from other enterprise systems, so that it serves as the primary performance management system.

Why wait?

By implementing these three best practices, your finance team can transform itself and your company’s performance management practices. Your finance team can move beyond simply being effective at financial management and scorekeeping, and instead become a trusted and integral member of the strategic management team. And finance can offer real performance insights that can truly help your managers improve their results.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

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!

FP&A Done Right: Is Your Planning Process Hindering Decision Making?

June 18, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, explaining how and why you should foster a culture of planning.

Long planning cycles. Short-lived plans. Siloed efforts. Hard-to-find errors. And never enough time for strategic analyses.

Do these FP&A issues ring a bell?

They should, if your planning processes are largely manual and mostly spreadsheet based, and don’t lend themselves to collaboration or version control.

An over-reliance on spreadsheets and legacy on-premises applications constrains the organization with rigid, siloed planning. These legacy planning environments are inflexible and brittle, prevent collaboration, and fail to deliver insights that drive decision-making.

Often, finance leaders are not even aware of how manual processes such as the gathering and consolidating of data, cumbersome email-based communication, and complex report creation put a strain on finance resources—a strain that keeps the finance team locked in low-value tasks. And while markets, revenue targets, and costs constantly move, old-world planning processes hinder related planning and reporting and slows decision-making to a crawl. Leaders either don’t have numbers they trust or don’t have the insights needed for agile decision-making.

Create value in all corners of the organization

Opportunities to grow are exceedingly challenging in a highly competitive and increasingly global environment. CFO research surveys typically characterize their corporate innovation efforts as highly successful. The success rate is low because getting the people, processes, and data all moving in the same direction can be difficult. To create value in all corners of the organization—sales, marketing, operations, and HR—everyone needs to fully engage with the planning process.

A siloed, spreadsheet-based approach leaves operational leaders in the dark and keeps business planning out of sight. Stakeholders don’t know where they are falling short; they can’t manage what they can’t see. While traditional planning functions on a rigid schedule (e.g., monthly), business operations are incredibly fluid. No business leader should be forced to wait until the month-end report is generated to make a decision. A finance team’s inability to provide insights in a timely manner hampers decision-making across the organization.

It’s no wonder that forward-thinking organizations are opening their eyes to a more effective and efficient way to plan—modern planning. Companies that adopt a modern planning process are better prepared to identify and take advantage of growth opportunities and operate more efficiently. Modern planning is collaborative, so you can plan as a team, and it’s continuous, so you can rapidly adapt to change.

Fostering a culture of planning

Instead of complex legacy applications and hordes of spreadsheets strewn across the organization, competitive organizations leverage cloud-based planning solutions to respond proactively to an ever-changing marketplace. Enterprise performance management solutions that integrate planning with source ERP, CRM, HR, and payroll systems offer a single version of the truth that fosters a culture of planning built on trust and real-time data.

Forward-thinking finance organizations recognize that planning will no longer suffice in a real-time, data-centric environment. The days of building elaborate spreadsheets to forecast the business trajectory—only to put them away until the next planning cycle—are fading quickly, at least at companies that want to remain competitive. A new modern planning model is emerging, centered around cloud-based tools to build accurate planning models faster, reduce errors, foster collaboration, and drive better decision-making. As stakeholders are more involved in the planning process, they’re gaining greater trust in the data. Leading finance organizations are using modern planning to:

Free up finance time and capacity
Improve the accuracy and integrity of finance and accounting data, plans, and reports
Accelerate cycle times for critical finance processes like month-end close, operational reporting, planning, and what-if analysis
Enhance collaboration with business stakeholders

In short, these finance organizations are leading with insights to drive business decisions and, in the process, elevating the role of finance to be more strategic.

Change starts at the top

Modern planning requires a cultural shift, but the rewards make it worth the effort. It can be difficult to get people to move from the comfort of their familiar spreadsheets to cloud-based collaborative planning tools, and the change has to start at the top.

The key to successfully transitioning to a modern planning model is thoughtful change management, wherein all parties understand the value of centralized planning tools and how they can contribute. When everyone takes ownership and knows how they are expected to add value, innovative planning, analytics, and performance measurement engage more people—including sales, marketing, operations, and HR—in the process of planning, moving away from the old, static models of the past.

The true payoff of modern planning is realized when everyone is working together on a continuously updated plan that incorporates fresh, valuable, and trusted data.

Tomorrow’s winners will be the most agile

In summary, modern planning means business agility. And business agility means organizations like yours can think fast, move first, and change rapidly, while maintaining control and stability. It means you can understand not only what’s going on but also how you could respond and what effect your actions would have.

It enables you to meaningfully digest the new volume, variety, and velocity of data by capturing it all in a single, intuitive, integrated environment, and surfacing the critical information you need to make decisions.

It brings your whole business together by broadening participation in planning and strategy to improve both day-to-day operations and your understanding of the overall dynamics of your business.

It’s continuous and company-wide, supported by a platform that’s easy-to-use, fast, and powerful. That makes it easier to model complex scenarios, link together operational and financial plans, monitor executional results, analyze past and current performance, and drill down into (or roll-up) fine-grain reporting from any area of the business.

The world isn’t going to slow down, and markets aren’t going to get less competitive. In the long-term (and probably before then) business agility isn’t going to be just a nice-to- have, or even a significant differentiator.

It’s going to be the deciding factor between the businesses that survive, and the businesses that wish they had.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

FP&A Done Right: 3 Steps for Selecting your KPIs

May 7, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, explaining how to identify the most appropriate KPIs for your organization.

Now more than ever, companies that are unable to adapt or pivot easily to adjust to changing market conditions don’t just risk falling behind. They risk their very future.

But business agility isn’t something you can implement overnight. It takes a modern, multifaceted planning environment—one that isn’t weighed down by static, legacy planning processes characterized by spreadsheets, siloed data, outdated annual plans, and stale historical snapshots.

Today, forward-thinking CFOs and their FP&A teams understand the need for nimble, data-driven financial modeling powered by cross-departmental collaboration and encompassing a panoramic view of the business—one where planning happened not just within finance but throughout the enterprise. This is the definition of modern approach to planning.

And it’s exactly what businesses need right now.

In a recent blog, we outlined the three key steps that help you lay the groundwork for a modern planning model within your own organization. To realize the full potential of that groundwork, you’ll also want to engage a series of key initiatives that will amplify your ROI and increase the velocity of business transformation. Here we look at the first of these: identifying your critical KPIs.

When everything is important, nothing is important

When everything is deemed critical, how can you be expected to prioritize? It’s impossible to effectively plan or make decisions quickly when it’s unclear what is truly driving business success. Bring those mission-critical KPIs to light, however, and you can quickly get everyone aligned around them.

But before homing in on these metrics, it’s imperative to step back, take a look at the entire organization, and recognize that performance is tracked differently in each department and team. Your core KPI model should take into account different flavors of measurement strategy across departments, recognizing the metrics that weave through multiple departments. This will help ensure that planning is collaborative and comprehensive, and that tracking progress and reporting means the same thing to all the players involved. The biggest plus in all of this? This shared measurement strategy establishes company-wide ownership and direction.

To help you isolate your organization’s KPIs (and ultimately to plan better), consider these three steps.

1. Partner with operational leaders to uncover their mission-critical KPIs.

Rather than try to guess what functional leaders care about, take the time to sit down with those key stakeholders and walk through how they define success. What does their measurement strategy look like? How do they currently track and manage their own progress? What are their data sources? Whom are their reports important to? Do they use specific language or terminology that might mean different things to people in other departments? Be as thorough as possible in fleshing out their measurement strategy and any processes they have in place to support it.

2. Keep it simple.

People can get caught up in attempting to adhere to KPIs that aren’t easily tracked or aren’t even truly indicative of performance. Avoid establishing complicated processes or adding new, hyper-focused metrics to the mix. Yes, your goal is to maintain accuracy, but you need to balance it with minimum resistance. The last thing you want is to get lost in data and complicated algorithms, forcing you in the end to have to manually follow up with gatekeepers when the time comes to pull a report.

3. Establish a reporting system.

After isolating the necessary KPIs, you’ll need to set up some workflows around reporting. What are the tools you need to access and generate a KPI report? Are these tools accessible and easy to use for all stakeholders? What are the bottlenecks, and who are the gatekeepers holding back the flow of KPI reports? Ensure your reporting operations are accessible, easy to use, and accurate enough to give you a true snapshot of your organization’s progress—without data overload.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.