I was on a sales call with a CFO, Phil, a few weeks ago when he shared an all-too-familiar tale.

Like most finance teams, Phil’s team rarely has time to perform value-added work. With numbers and data across disparate systems, right now, all his team has time to do is, in his words, “just collect.”

For Phil, it’s maddening. By the time his team can get the data into a consumable report for him, the data is old and (now) irrelevant. And “changes on the fly” can’t exist. His team can’t integrate finance data with non-finance data and because there are system inefficiencies and other barriers to getting the information he needs to make sound decisions. Phil summed up his frustrations

BY THE TIME MY TEAM COLLECTS THE DATA AND DELIVERS A REPORT TO ME, IT’S TOO LATE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Phil’s not alone. In my 20+ years career in CPM services, the still-reigning number one concern they share is data quality.

In this digital age, data overwhelms organizations; it’s everywhere. Because of the sheer amount of data companies have in their arsenal, most struggle to use it effectively. If internal systems are a barrier to success, organizations need to act. CFOs, like Phil, shouldn’t worry about being able to get the real-time data they need to help inform decision-making, set future benchmarks, and manage risks.

If you’re a CFO yourself, you probably have asked the question: Can I trust the data?

It seems like an easy question, but many senior finance officials can’t answer the question with confidence. What organizations need is simple: a single source of truth. And one of the best solutions on the market to get one version of your numbers—in real time—is OneStream.

ONESTREAM ALLOWS CFOS TO TRUST THAT THE NUMBERS THEY USE ARE ACCURATE. 

OneStream can connect to any general ledger (GL) and load the data from the GL to OneStream automatically. I am currently working with another client that has an automated routine that loads and consolidates their data every hour enabling the company to see how they are trending against forecast, budget and the prior year before the month is even closed! Moreover, OneStream provides the ability to capture commentary and documentation so that controllers can explain variances against a budget or prior year results. In addition to the core platform capabilities, OneStream provides additional downloadable solutions via their MarketPlace.

With additional MarketPlace XF solutions, companies can continue to enhance their investment in OneStream and improve their close process, thus trusting the numbers even more.

• Task Manager provides the ability to track all tasks leading up to the monthly close and pushing the company works towards meeting a world-class close in 3 days.

  • Task Manager dashboards provide an easy and efficient way to see the status of each task, see if any tasks are past due, and slowing down the close.

• Tax Provisioning allows for the tax department to easily compile all the schedules needed to confidently report consolidate and statutory effective tax rates as well as other key footnotes.

• Account Reconciliations can eliminate the reconciliation done in Excel or Blackline having to load your GL data to another system as OneStream already has the data loaded that needs to be reconciled and provides the ability to drill back to transactional and subledger detail to support your reconciliations.

ONESTREAM’S DASHBOARDS EMPOWER MANAGERS

OneStream’s dashboards empower managers to see, in real-time, any changes and actions performed by the user. For example, Guided Reporting is a powerful dashboard to allow CFOs to see all key reports and metrics. The Workflow guides users through each step that is required to complete the close and every action performed by the user are kept in a log so that auditors can easily see any changes made within the system. For finance teams, this provides traceability and auditability throughout the solution. Again, there are dashboards provided by OneStream to easily view the status of the Worklfows and all audit logs.

BETTER PARTNERSHIP AND CONVERSATIONS

OneStream’s better documentation also allows for increased partnerships and more productive conversations with other departments and functions. Those who work in finance know that the department is usually isolated. If the CFO is the keeper of the data, organizations need the COO and the CHRO to be a part of those conversations. The more finance can harness more data, beyond just the financial numbers, the greater its value is to the business.

As we say at Archetype, we want to empower employees to stop being scorekeepers and become business partners. With OneStream, CFOs and their teams can stop wasting days doing non-value-added work of collecting the data and going through manual processes and tedious spreadsheets. Instead, they are using a platform that allows for the automation of loading and compiling the data, the collection of comments that enables a CFO to understand what is going on with the company and dynamic and powerful dashboards to empower managers, controllers and CFOs to assess how the monthly close is progressing view real-time data that enables true analysis for better decision making.

Dear CFOs, how much confidence do you have in your data? If you use OneStream, a lot.