Infobesity is on your doorstep. Adopt a new diet for your financial and accounting data

A risk in being overly eager to ride the wave of digital transformation is that finance departments could well end up victims of a data tsunami.

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The finance department is a natural receptacle for huge volumes of data. Its strict protocols oblige it to process and reprocess vast quantities of data to feed an ever-increasing number of reports, be they regulatory, such as CSR, or management reports.

On the one hand, the company’s business lines want to be able to rely on finance experts and their data to make decisions and optimize the smooth running of their respective activities. They expect the Finance and Accounting Department to become a trusted partner.

On the other hand, the finance department is overloaded with more and more data produced by a plethora of systems that follow different formats, standards, and objectives.

For each data requirement, a specific factory is set up. Each of these relies on ad hoc interfaces, specifically formatted data, spreadsheet-based transformation programs, scripts and, ultimately, a lot of manual work, with very little capacity for traceability, checks, and corrections.

It’s time for a change of regime! And time to rely on an accounting and financial hub which will centralize all interfaces, transformation rules, controls, audit trails, etc., and finally enable consistent, high-quality data to be exposed to all target functions: from regulatory consolidation to reporting, or planning and analysis to data lakes.