Finance & Accounting - The Shifting Mandate

Three decades ago, we celebrated when the Trial Balance, and Balance sheet would tally. We would manually write Journal Entries, Post Leaders, create Trial Balance and Balance Sheet. Generation today, might not even know what tallying a Trial Balance or for that matter what even a Trial Balance is, except for something that they would have studied in some accounting book. A typical accounting office was filled with books, papers, files and dust.

With Technology, and ERP's in place, slowly, things started getting automated, and the number of books and papers around started reducing. Office became partially paperless; outsourcing, offshoring, and shared services started becoming very popular. ERP's like JD Edward, SAP, Oracle, People soft took care of Accounting, there were Data storage systems like Hyperion, Crest etc. and reporting tools like COGNOS, Essbase. This enabled moving activities to a central location, as businesses started growing global and so was born shared service centre.

I ) Shared Service Centre's:

During initial days in setting up of SSC (Shared Service Centre), the main objective was Cost Reduction. SSCs since then have evolved and focus has shifted from cost reduction to best-in-class unit within an organization. Best-in-Class includes rendering service with efficiency improvement, automation of processes, Service Level Agreement for various processes and become a strategic value/finance partner for the company. The 3 main phases of SSC are as under:
Phase I - Setup and stabilization phase - during initial 1-2 years company will have 10-15% of cost savings due to consolidation of resources, giving up space at each Business Unit (BU), multitasking of resources among others.
Phase 2 – Development Phase – during 3-6 years of functioning of SSC there will be further cost saving of almost 15-20% (hence by end of 6th year of SSC the total cost saving will be in the range of 25-35%). Further the below benefits will accrue to the organization as a whole; Greater knowledge of processes and improving the activities for increased efficiencies; Turning data into analytics for the organization to take informed decisions (like spend analytics, supplier groupings, reduced procurement cost, improved coordination among BU’s); Better productivity and stronger controls (mitigation of risks); Sharing of best practices.
Phase 3 – World Class Operations phase – from year 7 onwards, the SSC will function at the best in class level. This will involve, automation of processes, real time dashboard of health of SSC, contribution of SSC towards organizational goals, integration of all functions to work seamlessly. Additionally the SSC and organization can have following achievements; SSC able to generate revenue by charging to BU’s for the services provided; have a robust SLA in place which measures the performance; Can be spin-off as a separate entity and provide service to larger industry; Should be able to cater to international BU’s (global scale of operations); Digitization of work flow (paper-less processing); Robotics Process Automation.

II) Outsourcing: Make or Buy:

Examining the relevant costs of keeping activities in-house versus outsourcing, organisations capitalise on the expertise of another company that is more efficient, effective, or knowledgeable at performing a specialized task that is peripheral to the firm's core business competencies which help them to focus on strategic revenue-generating activities. We have global firms, providing specialized services in implementing new technology, managing change, even for the Finance and Accounts activities both onshore and offsite, rendering the book closure with improved quality and timeliness. This do come with knowledge "give-away", confidentiality issues, limited flexibility, reduced quality control and lessened process control to name a few.



III) Changing Technology - Upgrade:

The current business environment is complex and uncertain. Yet in the midst of it, many enterprises are finding and harnessing opportunities to compete and grow. This is having a particular impact on CFOs and their teams. Given all the M&A activity, boards are insisting that finance expand its focus and priorities beyond the bottom line. Boards expect CFOs to become strategic partners supporting enterprise strategy and driving growth – while managing risk and compliance, market volatility, and creative destruction. And they are seeking ones who embrace new ways of working. F&A teams across industries are combining digital technologies and analytics with new skills and capabilities to turn finance into a strategic partner. This empowers workforce, rethinks compliance, and delivers accurate forecasts and performance insights that shape business decisions. Digital and Analytics, Business process automation and robotics, Machine languages - help access state of the art techniques. Today, AI can review large data sets to connect the dots, identify patterns,and easily produce results and new intelligence. With AI performing more time-consuming transactional work, F&A teams can use the analysis and insight to get better outcomes. This is augmented intelligence – where the combination of human with machine intelligence delivers real business results, such as growth, profitability, competitive advantage, and customer satisfaction. AI can take on transactional work and elevate F&A personnel in areas like invoice exceptions in accounts payable. While robotic process automation (RPA) is effective at rules-based, high-volume automation, such as supplier invoice and receipt matching, there are exceptions where a bot can't finish the job. By analyzing structured and unstructured data, both internal and external, AI also surfaces insights that can make decisions more accurate. With a centralized data foundation, different functions and people work with the same, consistent data sets. But you also need people with data engineering and master data management skills to create and maintain the pipelines going into the lake so that your data is clean and comprehensive. AI bias can creep in when decisions made by AI reflect the conscious or unconscious values of the people who designed it or data it's based on, for example, when finance teams make decisions on customers' credit or payment terms. Applying AI to F&A creates new demands for teams with both business and technical skills. People need industry and functional knowledge to provide essential context and review algorithms. Advanced teams are even hiring behavioral scientists and anthropologists. But they also need technical skills, such as forecasting, data scientists, and engineers, analytics, design thinking, and agile programming. Once you have the right people, they need the right infrastructure to work with. With easy access to intuitive technology at home, a workplace with outdated, clunky systems won't encourage them to stay.

Rather than redesigning entire systems and processes, you can take a modular approach using pretrained AI accelerators. Find solutions that use insights unique to your industry and can plug and play into core business processes to improve experiences, accuracy, and efficiency at previously impossible speeds. Anyone who has deployed a large-scale, transformative financial system such as Workday Financial Management will tell you about the pressure they faced to prove the business value of the investment. So what do you need to get the full benefits of your Workday Financial Management solution?
1. Focus on speed from the outset: Your leadership team will no longer wait 12 to 24 months for payoff. They need to see it now. But you should plan this payoff well ahead of any investment. It can't be an afterthought.
2. Align platform design to your business needs: Powerful platforms can only prove their worth if they're designed to meet your business' needs and are based on your team's skills.
3. Focus on quick implementation: As soon as you design your solution, you need to have it up and running quickly.
4. Look outside the business for expert skill sets: We all have skills shortages in the workplace – getting the right talent can be time-consuming and costly. Identify the gaps you have and ways to fill them. Harness the existing talent, and help them grow, by providing necessary training.

The Workday EIB (Enterprise Interface Builder) is an easy to use tool, not needing any coding that supplies users with both a guided and graphical interface which can supplement programming and is not a replacement. Developers use EIBs to insert simple components into their larger code and for recording different types of data. The two primary options are outbound EIBs and inbound EIBs. An outbound EIB withdraws data from a specific source and then saves extracted data for further use or sends it to be processed. The majority of outbound EIBs use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to transfer data. An inbound EIB rather than using FTP, transfers data directly, are extremely simple to use and have friendly interfaces that are modeled on familiar items, like spreadsheets which allows for quick adoption. Along with this, one might need to have support from 3rd party, cloud connect, and a bit of manual intervention too; but the use of devises which was equivalent to a weapon for an accountant like calculators and macro enabled spreadsheets, has been considerably reduced.

Maximizing the benefit of your Workday investment does not need to be complicated. The Cloud Based technology, help you access the data on your go, even on your mobile. No more papers, sleepless nights to get your Balance Sheet right, have different systems for ERP, Consolidation of reports etc.; you can have all under one roof, easily accessible from anywhere at anytime; even linking HR and Finance data.