PlanPulse combines added value, personal growth and fun .

Our team is specialized in analyzing and improving EPM processes.

Check out our customer cases and blogs for more insights!

PlanPulse combines added value, personal growth and fun .

Our Expertise

Financial
Consolidation

Streamlines and accelerates the financial closing process, ensuring timely and accurate reporting for better decision-making.

The financial close is the whole accounting process cycle, including data gathering, creating financial statements and closing the books on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. And the financial close remains an essential activity for finance teams. Also, as financials need to act more and more as business partners within their organization, the focus for finance professionals is also more towards strategic business development than general financial stewardship. As a result, labor intensive and error-prone activities (like financial consolidation is in a lot of cases…) need to be minimized and/or automated.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Fast Close?

The financial close is the whole accounting process cycle, including data gathering, creating financial statements and closing the books on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. And the financial close remains an essential activity for finance teams. Also, as financials need to act more and more as business partners within their organization, the focus for finance professionals is also more towards strategic business development than general financial stewardship. As a result, labor intensive and error-prone activities (like financial consolidation is in a lot of cases…) need to be minimized and/or automated.

A fast close is the financial close, but fast(er). While the process of fast close consolidation isn’t new, achieving it often remains a pain point for many organizations. Organizations seeking to improve their financial consolidation are usually either handling this process using outdated legacy systems, separate applications that are loosely integrated, and/or many Excel spreadsheets. In nearly all cases, they are not taking advantage of newer technology.

On the other hand, just automating some of the steps isn’t the ideal solution either. In our opinion, it is a combination of people, processes and technology. In most cases, the processes can be improved and multiple steps can be automated. Both improvements will help the People in your organization to adept the changes and work smarter towards a fast(er) financial close.

What are the steps towards a fast close?

We like to use the following 5 steps to achieve a fast(er) close in the financial consolidation processes.

Set the goals
Identify issues
Solve & Automate
Train
Repeat

What is important towards a fast(er) close?

Create a single version of the truth

As highlighted above, many organizations still rely on an outdated approach where data is stored in separate silos. This causes data to be unreliable and time consuming. All too often, the ‘go to’ solution to this is utilizing platforms such as Excel – a time-consuming and largely unimpactful task for financial teams – and even then, data is still not 100% reliable.

The risk of human error, an inability to edit data collaboratively (at the same time), and a lack of intelligent insights are reasons that the use of spreadsheets for consolidation leaves a lot to be desired. Instead, organizations should be looking for a unified solution that provides a single version of the truth. Data is no longer siloed across multiple locations, meaning it can be appropriately utilized to offer valuable strategic insight in financial planning and forecasting.

Support processes with insights and workflow

Another relevant benefit for the users is to support the workflow in all steps to create insights in the status of the (closing) processes. In addition, smart checks and balances can be added to the (traditional) reporting packs. With the checks and the workflow, the financial close can be done smarter and faster! And with less frustration along the way…

Expanded capabilities to wider teams and users

Looking behind the financial close, there is another opportunity as the right solution is not limited by its users. Each member of an organization has a part to play; finance is not the only area that can (and will) benefit from a unified platform that returns transparent data and analysis. And as a financial, you want to be a real Business Partner.