Are you constantly searching for the best and most efficient way to streamline your financial close? Are you looking for increased accuracy of consolidation, better visibility into company-wide close processes, and greater ease of collaboration between multiple teams?

Cloud-based financial consolidation solutions could be the answer! By integrating cloud technology into their finance suite, organisations can reduce errors in tackling complex financial adjustments while ensuring speedy and reliable reports.

Let's dive deep into why cloud-based consolidation solutions quickly become the go-to option for finance teams looking for accurate results without compromising speed.
 

Goals of finance team members in financial consolidation

In the process of financial consolidation, various finance team members play crucial roles in ensuring the accuracy and effectiveness of financial reporting.

The CFO of an organisation is responsible for overseeing the entire financial consolidation process and ensuring that the financial reports are accurate, timely, and presented to stakeholders in the appropriate format. 

The VP of finance works closely with the CFO to manage the financial consolidation process and uncover potential risks by ensuring the reports comply with the law and are audit-friendly for effective communication with stakeholders.

The finance manager is tasked with supervising the day-to-day activities of the consolidation process, ensuring collaboration between teams, and monitoring the progress of each individual's tasks.

Finally, the accountant is responsible for accurate data collection, efficient data preparation, timely consolidation, and legally compliant reporting of the financial data.

In fulfilling these goals, the finance teams face challenges that can hinder the efficiency and accuracy of the financial consolidation process. Let's explore common hurdles in this journey.
 

What are the pain points that finance teams face?

Finance teams encounter various pain points in the financial consolidation process, significantly impacting efficiency, accuracy, and compliance. 
 

One major challenge is data inaccuracy, as handling large volumes of financial data in Excel can introduce errors and inaccuracies. Moreover, the sheer size of the data complicates collaboration across different finance teams and extends the time required for consolidation.

Another pain point is the complexity of data preparation, involving tasks like currency conversions, intercompany reconciliations, and eliminations. Managing these intricacies takes time and can lead to delays in the consolidation process.

The challenge intensifies with the dynamic nature of compliance standards. After completing complex tasks like currency conversion and intercompany eliminations, presenting financial data in a standard format compliant with evolving regulations becomes challenging. Finance teams struggle to keep pace with changing compliance requirements, leading to potential errors and non-compliance.

Ensuring traceability and audit trails is crucial for auditable financial reports. Tracking every transaction and editing history in Excel sheets becomes a herculean task. This lack of traceability poses challenges during audits, where auditors seek detailed information about data edits and transactions.

Practically, accountants face on-the-ground challenges such as complex interfaces and multiple spreadsheets. Using multiple spreadsheets in financial consolidation can lead to confusion and errors. In the case of legacy solutions, complex interfaces make day-to-day navigation difficult for users.

Moreover, the need for extensive training adds to the challenges. Many solutions in the market demand intensive training for finance team members, creating a demotivating environment and making it challenging for them to adopt complex tools.

Even with familiar tools like Excel, using VBAs, macros, and other complex formulae increases the dependence on other teams and delays the close cycle.

A shift to modern, user-friendly, and automated financial consolidation solutions becomes imperative in addressing these pain points. These solutions offer streamlined processes, reduced manual efforts, and improved accuracy, ultimately enhancing the overall efficiency of financial consolidation for finance teams.

 

The promise of cloud financial consolidation solutions

Just like the wise ones say, “Every problem always has a solution”; even the problems of the finance team have a solution, thanks to cloud-based financial consolidation solutions.

The challenge of data inaccuracy in consolidation can be solved with the help of automation. The JustPerform financial consolidation cloud and JustPerform Excel connector can automatically upload the data from various Excel sheets to the financial consolidation cloud in no time. The feature supports automatic data integration from more than 80+ source systems. Automation significantly reduces errors and shortens process time.

The finance team can easily deal with complex tasks like currency conversions, intercompany eliminations, and reconciliations with the help of the business rules library. The finance team can use the inbuilt business rules or custom-build them to suit their requirements. The business rules library of JustPerform simplifies the finance team's work by automating complex adjustments, thus reducing the time and errors in the consolidation process.
 

The finance team need not worry about the ever-changing compliance requirements thanks to JustPerform’s inbuilt IFRS and Multi GAAP compliant templates. The team can always stay compliant with the help of the built-in audit-friendly report and templates. This also reduces the time for building the reports, leading to faster close cycles.

The finance manager can easily keep track of the status of each team’s progress in the consolidation process while maintaining data security. Both can be achieved with the fine-grain authorisations provided by JustPerform. This helps the manager trace every data point's history, bringing complete transparency and auditability to the financial reports. Also, the role-based access feature of JustPerform ensures data security. All of this helps the manager completely control the financial consolidation process.

JustPerform combines the best of both worlds by offering a familiar interface to finance users. The finance team enjoys the benefits of the cloud and the simple interface of Excel. This makes it extremely easy for the users to go about their day-to-day tasks, significantly reducing the time to complete tasks and avoiding additional training costs for the entire team, and most importantly offering the finance team complete ownership.
 

With the emergence of cloud-based solutions, the finance team has a more efficient and accessible way to complete financial consolidation. The primary goal of all finance members is to consolidate financial data quickly and accurately using cloud-based solutions

JustPerform enables this with excellent features like an Excel connector, business rules library, inbuilt legally compliant templates, fine grain authorisations, intuitive interface, and many more. Here is an interesting read for you to fully understand how JustPerform can be the one-stop solution for all your financial consolidation needs. So what are you waiting for? Invest in the financial close solution that makes life easier for the entire finance team so that they can focus on high-value activities.