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Are you struggling with your year end reporting?

  • Does it take you 20 days or even longer to complete your year-end close?
  • Are you struggling with consolidations for multiple subsidiaries that each run different financial management systems?
  • Do you struggle to run reports in a timely fashion because you are not confident in the integrity of your data?

If you answered YES to any of the above, your year-end financial close is bound to be incredibly stressful.

Year End Problems

Everyone’s year-end close experience is different, but there are some common threads in the journey to sleepless nights, elevated blood pressure and caffeine overload. See if any of these sound familiar:

  • Overwhelming reporting demands.
  • Reports take too long to run, or you have to take multiple steps – extracting data from your ERP and dumping it into Excel – to create the reports people want.
  • Every stakeholder, from creditor to investor to auditor to employee, wants answers when they want them, but you can’t deliver because you’re not confident in the accuracy of your data.
  • Too many sources of data.
  • Data can live in your ERP, in Excel spreadsheets on individual desktops, and in subsystems that have yet to be reconciled.
  • You may not know whether all purchase orders have been reconciled to accounts payable or whether invoices in your CRM system have been recorded as accounts receivable. Plus, if your company has multiple subsidiaries, they may all use different accounting and financial management systems.
  • Not enough trained staff.
  • When you use many tools, people need to know how to use all of them during the reconciliation process.
  • You may have one person who’s an expert on one system and another who knows another system inside and out, but not everyone has the skills they need to use every system, and there’s not enough in the training budget to make up for the shortfall.
  • Discrepancies between teams.
  • You’ve shown up at meetings with spreadsheets in which you had a number for a specific account only to discover that others had different numbers for the same thing.
  • Figuring out reconciliations, budgets, forecasts, and variances without a single source of truth adds risk and inefficiency to your closing process.

In addition to these worries, you have to deal with an endless series of tasks, from completing inventory counts to writing off bad debt. With pressures like these, it’s no wonder you have sleepless nights. But…

  • What if your end-of-year close could happen in one or two days instead of in a month?
  • What if next year’s budgets and forecasts were already seeded with valid data, and you didn’t have to start from scratch?

Year-end close is no longer a time for panic. It’s a time of assessment, reflection and looking forward with confidence. Don’t wait for another frustrating financial close to do something about year-end close panic attacks. Familiarise yourself with the best year-end ERP solutions today.

A better year-end close could mean time and money saved on audit prep and higher confidence in the data you deliver. Most importantly, instead of answering to business units by running reports and validating data, you can become a strategic advisor telling business teams which efforts can deliver the greatest ROI.

 

Get a demo of one of our solutions today.