Blog & Newsroom

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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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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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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What does Moore’s Law mean for business?

Moore’s Law wasn’t intended to be a law. When Gordon Moore observed, in 1965, that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit was doubling roughly every two years it was exactly that: An observation. Albeit one that held true for half a century and dictated semiconductor development roadmaps. However, more recent discussions have questioned whether Moore’s Law still applies in today’s technological landscape. Intel (two years ago, no less) changed its roadmap to push back new chip models and,

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How does AI fit with automation?

AI, most regularly associated with artificial intelligence, has become a bit of a stand-in term for what is really a broad selection of technologies that encompasses machine learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing, object recognition and more. To the uninitiated, it can be a bit confusing, so everything ends up under the umbrella term “AI.” It’s a bit like that family member who refers to all tablets as an “iPad,” regardless of the actual device they’re holding or referring to.

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The new paradigm: Automation-as-a-service

In mathematics, the idea of “bounded value” generally refers to the notion that there’s a limit to the value of “x.” Conversely, “unbounded value” means there’s no maximum or minimum value of “x.” In automation, a similar notion carries through — there’s no minimum value you can extract by using a tool such as RunMyJobs by Redwood on a limited set of processes, but there’s also no maximum value, as it scales efficiently for businesses of all sizes and complexities.

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Blockchain and automation: A perfect match?

Trust is an important part of any business transaction. Trust within an organization is often implicit but it is a more difficult proposition when it comes to the need to share data to third parties, partners and other external organizations. Most often, this is done via a distributed database of some kind, which could take many forms — for example, a cloud-based platform to share documents. This addresses accessibility but not the trust issue. Blockchain, at least in theory,

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What happens when you automate the finance department?

With increased pressure to do more with less, almost all business units are now required to work in a more agile way to maximize efficiency — and the same is true of finance. The CFO and finance department should seek to collaborate with the wider business, to find ways to modernize and digitize tasks and processes wherever possible using knowledge from the people who perform the tasks day-in, day-out. Finance is a crucial part of any business,

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Is 100% automation really feasible – and do I want it?

Fewer errors. Repetitive tasks eliminated. Speedier execution of processes. These are among the promises of “end-to-end automation,” or “100% automation.” But the shift can still be a daunting prospect for a company without prior experience. Concerns around a lack of process oversight and audit requirements, or vulnerability to errors going unnoticed, are entirely avoidable. In some cases, they’re based on interactions with more primitive automation tools. Consider the path to 100% automation as analogous to regular cars evolving into self-driving cars.

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