Financial consolidation solutions are growing in importance as mergers and acquisitions are becoming popular within the business ecosystem. Over the years, large-scale multinational organizations that were publicly traded and had sophisticated requirements were the only crowd that laid eyes on financial consolidation. But as time marches on, there is no element of surprise that even small-sized organizations have their hands on several legal entities across states and countries. Although, their requirements need not be too complex, creating a set of consolidated accounts in spreadsheets can prove to be too cumbersome and error-prone.

However, there are several financial consolidation solutions available that will optimize and add value to the existing processes and systems. Several top-notch companies are susceptible to a highly-integrated enterprise performance management (EPM) solution. Oracle’s best-in-class EPM solution promises faster financial close cycles spanning as shorter as 5 days with capabilities such as automated reporting coupled with narrative analysis.

As closing the books and consolidating reports remain a huge challenge for the finance professionals, what should be the essential attributes required towards building a high-value automated financial consolidation process?

  1. Adapting to the change in workflow

The flexibility of an organization to accommodate time for a complete analysis serves as the X-factor in the financial close process. However, the truth is there is never enough time to explore all the options available to examine your business growth due to the fluctuating business parameters. There is always a possibility that the metrics used in the initial and final models are completely different.

Oracle’s EPM solution offers the luxury of seamlessly adding in dimensions anytime during the middle of a financial close process, without having to start over from scratch. The main advantage of Oracle EPM Cloud is that it allows organizations to measure and report on activities differently in forecasting than in the close process as standardizing on a single model throughout is highly unnatural.

  1. Visibility across business processes

Oracle EPM Cloud serves as an all-in-one combo plate for organizations as it comes with an in-built end-to-end module for financial consolidation, close process management, analytics, tax reporting, account reconciliation, data integration, and narrative reporting under financial close. Unlike imposter EPM vendors, Oracle helps you deploy best practices instantly and saves the trouble of consulting effort for templates and starter kits.

  1. Taking ownership of EPM Solution

Opting for imposter EPM vendors is never a good idea since they delay your process and introduce higher cost to company, especially if you consult more than one solution provider. Organizations are also forced to rely on consultants for their expertise in Visual Basic, which could result in frequent modifications due to the lack of packaged content. The finance professionals do not require any IT skills when they deploy Oracle ERP Cloud in their financial close process.

  1. Automation-driven business process

Robotic Process Automation is a bright candidate to automate simple, rule-based operations such as account reconciliations to speed up the process and enhance accuracy, allowing finance professionals to focus only on accounts with anomalies.

RPA takes care of all the data-intensive tasks such as ledgers, reconciling balances, exporting data into the consolidation process to eliminate potential human errors and delay in financial notifications. When coupled with machine learning technologies, cognitive automation offers end-to-end automation for several cloud and on-premises solutions including Oracle EPM.

A complete financial consolidation solution accounts for all of the above essential attributes in order to achieve transparency between business processes and responds to the varying business metrics to address stakeholders’ demands to fulfil their financial close processes. Imposter vendors do not offer a hybrid solution and falls well short of the attributes Oracle ERP possesses.

 

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