Businesses today face compression in their financial reporting cycles, resulting in intense pressure to close their books in fewer days. In this “need for speed,” organizations can no longer afford extended closing periods, nor can they continue to be transaction focused.
Using our knowledge of general accounting principles and business processes, Grant Thornton’s financial function improvement can help you to develop streamlined closing and consolidation processes; establish more transparent and predictable financial reporting; and implement the proper technologies to create timelier closing and consolidation processes.
Our finance function improvement services includes:
- Identifying how finance can use this process to help you achieve your strategy
- Assessing your current closing processes to understand the key activities
- Assessing the relative value of activities and the time/effort it takes to complete them
- Eliminating or reducing activities that add little or no value
- Spreading your workload across the month o Identifying information that managers need to make timely decisions and how best to provide it o Improving the productivity and the job satisfaction of your employees
- Identifying technologies or other tools to support your closing process
Accelerating the financial close process provides an opportunity to improve:
Performance
- Improves the quality, accuracy and timeliness of financial information
- Reduces time to close the books each period
- Eliminates unnecessary and / or manual activities
- Increases ability to make business decisions with actual data
Control of finance activities
- Reduces number of manual entries
- Integrates databases between applications
- Reduces risk of errors by developing policies and processes for the financial close Value of the finance organization
- Transforms role of finance from tactical to strategic
- Improves the quality (through training) and job satisfaction of your finance and accounting team
