Blog & Newsroom

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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Process automation for unicorns — The secret to billion-dollar success?

Regular readers of the technology and business press will probably be familiar with the term “unicorn” — first popularized back in 2013 by TechCrunch. It was used in an article about venture capital and referred to the unlikely eventuality that any startup an investor backed would go on to achieve a valuation of more than $1 billion. It was also a fairly narrow definition, as it only looked at United States-based software businesses started in 2003.

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Automate for simplicity and flexibility

In 1960, Vice Admiral Paul D. Stroop, chief of the United States Navy’s weapons bureau at the time, put a plan in place to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of producing the Navy’s aerial weaponry. Project KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) was born — and it’s a principle that’s still applicable to most enterprises today, despite the seemingly highly-complex, interconnected processes that drive them. Putting automation at the heart of processes is essential to achieve the always-on approach most businesses now require — and settling for time-based batch processing just doesn’t cut it anymore.

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How does automation-as-a-service work and what are the benefits?

The seismic shift to cloud-based services, both consumer- and business-facing, isn’t driven by a relentless dedication to using whatever’s hot in technology. It’s happening because this service delivery method brings specific advantages: cost, availability and uptime, to name just a few. According to the Forbes’ 2018 State of the Cloud report, 77% of enterprises have at least one application or portion of their infrastructure in the cloud. Many technology-oriented businesses aim to move 100% of services to the cloud.

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Automated scheduling in action: How Whitbread achieved automation success

Since the start of the year, we’ve devoted time to discussing the benefits of automation, as well as the real world costs and potential pitfalls of relying on outdated workload automation (WLA) solutions. And while we pride ourselves on the simplicity, scalability and transparency of the process automation services we deliver, we also know that real-life examples can really help people see the benefits and envisage their own automation journey. Simplify the landscape One of the biggest problems enterprises face when considering newer automation technologies is the patchwork of tools they’ll be replacing.

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The Risks of Out-of-Date Automation Technology Part 2: Beware the Hidden Costs

In the first post of this three-part series, we examined the wider issues that can arise in terms of sustainability and complexity. This week, we’re looking at the costs of relying on out-of-date workload automation (WLA) or scheduling technology. The need for a business to be responsive is – as we and those wiser than us have noted many times before – crucial. Whether it’s customer-facing functions or back-office nuts and bolts, the ability to respond immediately to changes is a constant.

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Growing pains: Why perpetual change is the only answer

If the constant pressure to modernize, transform and generally maintain a state of perpetual change feels like an invention of the modern age, you’d be wrong. In the 6th Century BCE, Greek philosopher Heraclitus stated that “the only thing that is constant is change.” While recognition of the need for change — or indeed, the inevitability of it — isn’t news to businesses, acting on it is by no means easy. The need to implement a digital-first strategy isn’t the sweat-inducing demand that it once was — but the unpleasant truth is that we want to change without going through the uncomfortable process of change.

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What’s the difference between AI and machine learning?

There’s an awful lot of marketing noise around the “machine learning” and “artificial Intelligence” capabilities of much consumer- and enterprise-facing software. But the interchangeable use of terms that mean different things has led to a lot of confusion. So let’s clear up, once and for all, exactly what these terms mean. and why they’re useful. Machine learning In short, machine learning is akin to a human learning how to perform a task more efficiently (or to result in a better outcome) through a process of trial-and-error.

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