For Finance Professionals in India

 Here's something that I thought will be useful for finance professionals in India: hashtag#FinanceWrapIndia hashtag#LIPostingChallengeIndia hashtag#LinkedInNewsIndia

(Posted in linkedin)

Three decades ago, we celebrated when the Trial Balance, and Balance sheet tallied. We would manually write Journal Entries, Post them into Ledgers, create Trial Balance and Balance Sheet. 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 (SSC):

 SSCs focus grew from cost reduction to best-in-class unit within an organization. 

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. 

Rule of the Thumb - If you are not from IT, do not invest in IT; outsource.

III) Changing Technology - Upgrade:

Boards expect CFOs to become strategic partners supporting enterprise strategy and driving growth while managing risk and compliance, market volatility, and creative destruction. 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, easily produce results and new intelligence. F&A teams can use the analysis and insight to get better outcomes. This is augmented intelligence. Robotic process automation (RPA) is effective at rules-based.

With easy access to intuitive technology at home, a workplace with outdated, clunky systems will not stay.

(An abridged version of my article in LinkedIn posted on 15th Oct.2019)