Financial Close, Consolidation, and Reporting:
Some words by Deloitte Consulting LLP
Today’s finance organizations face multiple priorities that include the oversight of financial transactions, management of enterprise performance, attestation of financial reporting, and timely close and consolidation of financial data. As they grapple with these issues, Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are always seeking ways to increase the efficiency and timeliness of their financial close and compliance processes. However, merely improving the speed of the financial close process is not enough. There is a competing demand for improved financial governance and increased transparency and reliability of data. Finance organizations need to proactively manage the challenges of data quality and prepare for new regulatory requirements to avoid creating a “perfect storm” for their financial close and consolidation processes.
Over the last decade, the financial reporting landscape has seen significant change. Finance executives face mounting pressure to increase the accuracy of financial reporting while decreasing turnaround time. Costs are being highly scrutinized as the longest recession in U.S. history continues. Regulatory agencies have introduced a host of new standards and accounting rules changing materiality thresholds, requiring detailed schedules, and new disclosures for public filings. To complicate matters, many finance organizations are being asked to do more with less, as headcounts are reduced in response to economic pressures.
Examples of the challenges faced by finance organizations today include:
• Typical public filings have grown from 10-15 pages to up to 75. Regulators and agencies continue to require more detailed explanations of public filings.
• Regulators have shortened the timeframe for filing requirements while increasing the demand for detail. Quarterly submissions are due within 40 days (down from 45) and annual filings due within 75 days (down from 90).
• The convergence of accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America (U.S. GAAP), IFRS, along with XBRL requirements requires new definitions for financial statements. Compliance has taken on a life of its own — requiring more time and expense for technical accounting and financial reporting.
• Faced with reduced staffs and high burnout, employee turnover continues to be very high as many CFOs have determined the stress and risks outweigh the benefits of the role.
Finance leaders find themselves squeezed between meeting public demands, attempting to ease the burden on overworked staff, and meeting the technical requirement of regulators. With limited resources, how can finance organizations deliver accurate, useful, and timely data to an increasing number of stakeholders? What effective practices do organizations follow to streamline processes while meeting regulatory obligations and increasing transparency?
Avoid the domino effect
The financial close is a set of sequential steps requiring alignment and a clear direction across the organization. Each step in the process has dependencies on others, and delays result in a domino effect, pushing each subsequent activity back and resulting in more manual efforts and decreased transparency. Organizations that are able to monitor and react during the close cycle can reduce the impact of a breakdown in the process.
The figure below illustrates the typical financial close process within the context of other finance operations:
Plotting the course: Phase I — Ledger close
Most organizations are faced with a similar set of challenges during the ledger close phase. While some accounting processes vary between industries, the underlying themes remain the same.
Challenge | Why? |
· Nonintegrated systems slow the flow of data required to close sub ledgers and business units | · Manual adjustments are typically required to finalize data Submission is impacted due to limited ability to extract a complete data set without time-consuming manual intervention |
· No close related accounting activity is performed during the critical ledger close period | · Corporate ledger closing requirements have not been formally defined resulting in site-specific processes · Status quo has evolved over time resulting in unclear roles and responsibilities |
· No capabilities to track performance to identify bottlenecks or recurring issues | · Routine occurrences are known only at the source and do not get resolved · Environments are reactive when issues arise because expectations are not communicated |
Effective finance organizations address these issues by establishing a ledger close governance framework. Central components of this governance include:
• Policies and procedures — establishing rules and defining requirements for accounting activities can lead to standardized processes and help mitigate the risk of accounting errors. Creating policy and procedure manuals is a good way to help achieve knowledge transfer.
• Roles and responsibilities — defining tasks and dependencies when ambiguities exist between functional areas can help clarify key activities and decision points. This can help increase the efficiency of a close process by reducing duplication of efforts.
• Ledger close calendar — developing a close calendar can provide finance with the ability to identify dependent sources of information for key activities and track progress against milestones. Additionally, assigning ownership to individual tasks can help improve status reporting and accountability.
• Ledger close scorecard — defining and tracking key close metrics can enable organizations to perform post-mortem evaluations to more easily identify improvement opportunities and facilitate target setting for future initiatives.
If you don’t have a plan, you typically won’t reach your destination on time. An effective ledger close governance framework should provide the tools to develop the plan, communicate it globally, and reinforce the roles and responsibilities that lead to greater accountability. Additionally, it should help encourage a proactive environment where more issues can be solved.
Create pieces to one puzzle not many: Phase II — Consolidation
The close and consolidation of financial books is the process that corporations use on a monthly or quarterly basis to reconcile, translate, eliminate, consolidate, and report financial information. Each company has their own recipe of closing and consolidating their financials with varying degree of efficiency and standardization.
What if:
• Business unit source ledgers had been absorbed over time and account structures have not been aligned?
• Transaction data required manual intervention in order to provide reporting and analysis?
• The U.S. dollar was not the currency supported in field ledgers?
• Segment and legal entity structures differ?
These are some common questions raised by stakeholders about the challenges of transforming transactional data into high-quality information. Often, the answers leave finance leaders in a position of having to explain why it takes so long to produce “multiple versions of the truth.” This can result in increased risk, more time required to reconcile data, and less time available to analyze it.
Challenge | Resulting issue |
· No commonality in account structure | · Inconsistent account use · Inaccurate financial statements |
· Multiple currency translations | · Different translation rates · Unpredictable currency translation implications |
· Unresolved Intercompany eliminations | · Manual corrections · Extended reconciliation efforts |
· Lack of visibility into legal entity or sub consolidations | · Offline tax reporting · Different rollups = different totals |
· No established hierarchy structure for accounts or entities | · Use of multiple spreadsheets for consolidation · Inability to adapt to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)/Agency requirements |
Unlike the ledger close phase, consolidation does not have a simple blueprint that provides financial executives with a framework for improvement. However, there are guidelines that effective finance organizations follow to make all the pieces fit together better:
• Define commonality — defining a common chart of accounts is typically the first step toward aligning local ledger data. Requiring field ledgers to map to a common set of data elements speeds consolidation, can improve accuracy, and help establish the skeleton of financial statements and supportive schedules.
• Create flexibility — creating flexible hierarchy structures can enable the consolidation tool to serve as the central repository for financial data. Establishing a multidimensional, multi-scenario solution can provide financial reporting a single platform to develop financial statements and schedules to help meet accounting and compliance requirements.
• Combine process and technology — before implementing technology, process owners and the technical design team need to collaborate on business requirements to better understand the current state. Combined efforts can result in a solution that will help reduce manual data entry, improve controls, and move the organization toward standardization.
The overall goal of the consolidation process is to collect and transform data into financial statements. Leveraging the principles listed above will help finance leaders in their efforts to provide tools and data to their growing number of stakeholders who rely on accurate and timely financial results to evaluate and measure performance, devise business strategy, and meet regulatory requirements.
Communicate with stakeholders through reporting: Phase III — Reporting
Financial reporting standards are under constant modification. The investment community and regulators continue to require more organized and systematic exchanges of financial information. This impacts both how and when financial data is distributed and communicated. In recent years, organizational and regulatory changes have increased both the level of effort and technology required to meet an ever increasing demand for more standardized data, quicker access to financial data, and visibility into financial reports and disclosures.
Reporting was once considered an outcome of the consolidation process; however, effective finance organizations now drive design of financial consolidation and reporting technology solutions by first defining the financial data detail requirements of compliance reports and schedules. Given today’s landscape, reporting requirements must be fully understood and taken into consideration when designing policies and procedures for all aspects of the financial close process.
What is being asked of financial reports and disclosure schedules?
Requirement | Challenge |
· Standardization and consistency in data | · Multiple financial statement hierarchy definitions · Time consuming manual efforts to prepare useful results |
· Flexibility and adaptability | · Inability to add or modify financial data structures · High cost to update and maintain systems |
· Transparency and visibility | · Lack of access to financial statement details due to offline combinations · Reliance on Excel spreadsheets and manual processes |
· Repurpose financial data | · Multiple versions of the truth · Disparate and nonintegrated reporting |
· Global applicability | · Different regions, different requirements · No universal or common unit for rollup and reporting |
Financial results have never been more scrutinized.
Quality results need to be provided timely, accurately, and to multiple stakeholders in regulatory agencies and the investment community. Effective finance organizations consider reporting the most critical component of the financial close, and therefore let reporting requirements drive the design of the entire process.
Visit www.cubexcel.com to find out how CubeXcel's 'Next Generation' Reporting and Analysis Software can help your company.
No comments:
Post a Comment