Blog & Newsroom

Automation lessons from the financial close front line

The often-frenetic activity of financial close processes is largely due to the huge amount of manual effort they entail every month or quarter. To reduce the pressure and risk this brings, there is an answer for finance departments: Use automation across the close. Done effectively, this can mean the financial close becomes a non-event. And it also allows finance staff to focus on essential analysis to provide essential insights that can improve broader business performance. In the recent “How to make the financial close a non-event”

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How to eliminate manual effort and stress and make your financial close a non-event

The financial close continues to weigh heavily on accounting organizations. A typical global close for a large organization today can involve over 100 companies that must be closed before group consolidation, with more than 500 processes per company plus many more sub-processes and hundreds of thousands of SAP-related activities. And all this frenetic activity always happens within the last few days of every month. It’s no surprise that the biggest concern, according to 97% of CFOs in a survey by FSN Research,

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Close the automation gap: Uncover the real cost of outdated automation

Workload automation (WLA) and scheduling are the workhorses of digital business. Unfortunately, the WLA landscape at many organizations has been built up over time in disconnected silos and layers. Recent analyst research has shown that only 8% of IT leaders believe that they have a unified approach and toolset for automation. At most organizations, core IT processes that support the business are automated using a combination of multiple legacy WLA and scheduling tools that are an average age of 24 years old.

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CSM Bakery Solutions successfully migrates its SAP job scheduling to RunMyJobs® workload automation

Who do you call when you’re in the middle of a major project to migrate all your SAP systems and you have just two weeks to replace your central job scheduling tool at the same time? CSM Bakery Solutions was in just that position in April and put out an urgent RFP. The response wasn’t great. Most job scheduling and workload automation companies either didn’t respond at all or said they couldn’t help. That’s when Redwood Software stepped up with RunMyJobs by Redwood,

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Arla Foods answers four key questions about its month-end close challenges

We asked dairy giant Arla Foods four key questions about the challenges of its month-end close and how to tackle them. The company is the one of the world’s largest dairy companies, selling products in more than 100 countries, with 19,000 employees and revenue of over €10 billion. In the video interview, Arla talks about reducing the time to close the books, the importance of having an overview of the month-end tasks and the challenges presented by the amount of close-related work,

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Reboot automation for hybrid IT: Service orchestration and automation via SaaS

Hybrid IT is now an approach that is widely used by most companies to effectively manage their businesses operations. But running systems and applications across public and private cloud and on-premises technology brings additional complexity that needs to be managed. For a digital business to be competitive, it needs workload automation technology that goes beyond the traditional capabilities of legacy workload or scheduling tools to effectively deal with the range of systems and applications and the growing number of technology types being used.

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Automation as a service delivers the best customer experiences

Reliability and scalability have always been key priorities for IT. With the unprecedented business impacts from COVID-19, they’re requirements. Your services — and your customers — depend on them. Many organizations spend significant time and expense to support the vision of an adaptable, always-on enterprise, and too many struggle to achieve it in spite of that investment. Time consumed by workarounds, patches and daily management, along with costs for on-premises hardware and licensing, can quickly spiral out of control.

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The evolution of financial shared services — from labor arbitrage and cost reduction to value delivery

Despite moves to ease the lockdown, no one needs reminding that it’s still far from business as usual. The huge changes to working practices and processes forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the failings of some traditional approaches to finance. As an extension of many organizations’ accounting capabilities, financial shared services is far from immune to this increased scrutiny, with the current situation prompting questions about how smarter approaches are now needed more than ever before.

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Workload automation is the next step for digital transformation

With the coronavirus crisis putting business as usual on hold, organizations are looking for more resilient ways to manage and reduce IT complexity. This, combined with a sudden need to have employees operate remotely from multiple locations, means that digital transformation plans are moving faster than ever. A key element in successful digital transformation, according to Dan Twing, president of Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™), is the modernization of “the IT tooling used to develop applications and manage the IT infrastructure.” This is where workload automation and job scheduling come in.

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How to prevent a bad audit: Four things you need to address

The role of external auditors is ultimately to assess whether an organization’s financial statements are a true and accurate reflection of the performance of the business. That gives stakeholders, such as investors and partners, confidence in the numbers. But this is no box-ticking exercise. The quality of the audit is paramount, particularly in light of high-profile cases where auditors have been fined for failing to identify fraud or financial misstatement that they should have spotted. Auditors are increasingly focused on issues such as ease of access to evidence that substantiates a transaction or process or compliance testing to ensure controls are fit for purpose and can avoid fraud and human error.

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Throw out the manual: Why auto-certification is key to faster and more accurate balance sheet reconciliation

Huge strides have been made in driving inefficiencies out of many financial processes. Yet balance sheet reconciliation is one of the last bastions of reengineering that has seen very little in the way of efficiency gains over the last decade. Traditionally, businesses have long relied on the accountant’s Swiss Army knife, the Excel spreadsheet, in conjunction with email, workflow systems and shared folders to help with the balance sheet reconciliation process. But it’s an approach that is fraught with problems and often fails to solve underlying issues.

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Purpose built for SaaS: What it means for business

Several tool providers claim to offer workload automation via SaaS, but, in reality they offer on-premises solutions that have been lifted and shifted to the cloud, without any changes made to take advantage of the inherent benefits of this new approach. Sure, by moving existing workload automation tools to the cloud, organizations take away the burden of running the software on an in-house datacenter, but the tools themselves still have the same limiting legacy architecture that causes headaches for businesses and IT.

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Five ways to identify intercompany differences earlier and drive a faster close

Intercompany elimination is a common barrier to a fast and accurate financial close. For large global organizations operating across multiple geographies and time zones, coordinating all the intercompany activities at month-end quickly becomes complex due to the sheer volume and interdependency of tasks and tight deadlines. The problem is that intercompany accounting still requires enormous manual effort to reconcile, adjust and record transactions, despite large investments in ERP and finance systems. In fact, 40% of senior finance professionals say difficulties in reconciliations and intercompany agreement is what delays the reporting process the most,

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What financial scandals show about the fraud risk of manual journal entry

Despite large investments in modern ERP and finance systems, manual processes like journal entry continue to leave businesses exposed to significant human error or fraudulent activities. This ultimately creates the opportunity for the material misstatement of financial results and all the implications that brings. WorldCom is the poster child for these types of financial scandals, where manual journals were used to inappropriately capitalize expenses as fixed assets, which inflated net income and total assets by $3.8 billion.

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How automation-as-a-service drives success in digital transformation

Digital business transformation, defined by Gartner as “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model,” requires organizations to fundamentally change the way they operate to become much more agile. Workload automation as a service, delivered via SaaS, provides critical support for this agility by fully exploiting the attributes of cloud technology. One of the challenges that comes with digital business transformation is increased complexity due to a hybrid approach in which systems are located in and interoperate across different on-premises,

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Why internal control systems won’t protect you against fraud

Effective internal controls are the cornerstones of integrity for many organizations’ financial and accounting information, by promoting accountability and preventing fraud. At least that’s what we’ve long been led to believe. Not surprisingly, a huge amount of work goes into ensuring that controls are in place, documented and tested to provide evidence that they are designed and operating effectively. And yet all this work is for nothing if employees are able to circumvent the control structure.

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The human cause of 4 major accounting errors and how to eliminate them

The reliance on manual controls and procedures remains a major cause of some of the most common accounting errors. We’re not just talking minor errors, such as an unmatched invoice, either. These manual processes result in material misstatements of financial results or business performance. All too often, they go out externally to regulators and investors. This is despite investment — even recent investment — in ERP systems, workflow software and various point solutions. And just to be clear,

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Four undetected errors that add to close stress — and how to fix them

Anyone working in finance knows how stressful the monthly financial close can be. Immovable, tight deadlines and the manual nature of much of the process results in long hours that impact staff wellbeing, turnover and often result in a reliance on temporary staff at this peak time. Frustrated staff have to work within sub-optimal processes that have evolved over years and don’t have the bandwidth to redesign them. Some of the biggest headaches are the errors that accrue but go undetected during the month and only come to light at the height of the period-end scramble.

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Ditch the spreadsheet and make your close faster and more accurate with finance automation

The month end close is a busy and stressful time for any finance team. One of the key elements to maintain some order within this chaos is task or checklist management. It’s vital to ensure the hundreds of closing tasks are all completed successfully, on time and in the right sequence. The problem is that most organizations still manage their close checklist in a very manual and inefficient way. This creates more stress and errors for those carrying out the tasks and has a negative impact on the accuracy and timeliness of closing the books and reporting group figures.

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Why automating journal entry upload is just the tip of the period close iceberg

Journal entries are a necessary but manually intensive and time-consuming part of the financial close. For large multinational organizations, some companies within the group might easily process more than a thousand journals each month. We’ve dealt with organizations that do a million manual journals a year. Some level of automation is clearly required to handle that volume of journals, but most organizations are missing the big prize. Think of it like the tip of an iceberg.

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What’s the secret to making your close a non-event? Focus on automating the first mile

The financial close is nothing short of an ongoing battle for many companies. Finance teams come under the same intense pressure at the end of every month, quarter and year as they struggle to complete the hundreds, if not thousands, of interdependent tasks that feed into the close process. At the same time, the close is undoubtedly critical to trust, financial visibility and regulatory compliance. It’s the foundation for the accuracy of a company’s numbers so they can be consolidated quickly to meet reporting deadlines.

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How outdated automation leads to more manual effort — and what you can do about it

IT departments are under pressure. They must ensure the technology that supports their organization is always on and secure. They must also roll out the right new tools to support successful digital business strategy. And they have to do all of this with limited amounts of money, time and skilled people. Given this balancing act, the less manual effort required from IT staff, the better. IT pros should focus on innovation and increased value — not just maintaining the status quo.

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Don’t Take Our Word for It – Experts Say Redwood Is a Workload Automation Leader

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits – easy implementation, scalability, flexibility, efficiency – of switching to a modern SaaS-based workload automation solution and how RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling can maximize these benefits. Now these benefits have been recognized by independent experts as well: Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) has named Redwood as Value Leader and RunMyJobs as the Best workload automation SaaS Solution in its 2019 EMA Radar™ for Workload Automation report.

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The challenges of moving from legacy schedulers and WLA tools (and how to overcome them)

We’ve recently discussed how some companies end up with a mixed bag of workload automation (WLA) tools, and the reasons this can happen. It’s all very well talking about this after the fact, but the reality is that many businesses — all too many — are caught between the “old” world and the “new.” The concerns about fully migrating away from old technology will be familiar to many: data integrity is paramount, downtime is an unacceptable outcome,

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