“Close-pocalypse” – A perfect storm of deadlines, reconciliations, and late nights.

At this time of year, our thoughts turn to relaxing and celebrating the holidays with our families and friends. But for corporate accounting and finance teams, winter also brings anxiety about their busiest time: the year-end close. Deadlines come quickly, as the volume of work seems to increase every year, and everyone works long and stressful days (and nights, and weekends.)

Mid-sized companies typically complete their year-end close in 2-3 weeks, while large, publicly-traded companies can take 4-6 weeks after the fiscal year end. Regardless of size, all corporations share a common goal: to shorten their close time and make the year-end process run as smoothly as possible. Maybe your company implemented OneStream some time ago, which streamlined the close significantly at the time. But over the years requirements have expanded, and the application has evolved into new areas. Now, there are new processes that involve more users, more data sources, more involved calculations, and more complex reporting. Suffice to say, the close is still painful, and you still dread the End-of-Year Everest.

What if this year, it didn’t have to be such an arduous process? What if there were ways to make the close less stressful for the whole team? What if there were OneStream solutions, functionality, and best practices that could make the year-end close process run more smoothly? In short, what if you could use OneStream more effectively to make your job easier?

To understand how to leverage the platform to improve year-end close, it’s critical to evaluate why it is so difficult, and where to focus your efforts. Ask yourself and your team:

• What are the most painful and time-consuming processes?
• How can we avoid rework? Which do we cycle repeatedly?
• Where are the bottlenecks? What causes delays and why?

Once you’ve identified the most difficult challenges in your year-end close, you can begin to mitigate them. Here are some common struggles, and how we’ve helped our clients navigate them:

Corporations distribute a year-end calendar to their teams with deadlines that reflect dependencies. Some companies still use Excel or Outlook to manage the close calendar, but there are some real limitations to this approach.

Task Manager is a centralized and integrated feature designed specifically to streamline and automate repetitive business tasks like the financial close process. Our clients have found OneStream Task Manager to be a better alternative, because it works on the same platform as the consolidation tools already in use for financial close activities. Consider these challenges that combining your close calendar with your financial platform can address:

• The close is based on dependencies, so late submissions often cause ripple effects that delay the entire process. Administrators and power users need process visibility to immediately identify and address missed deadlines. With Task Manager, they can link task assignments to specific workflow tasks, providing a real-time view of task status across the organization. Users can see the sequence of their responsibilities and deadlines, and then navigate to the appropriate steps directly from Task Manager.
  
  
• The year-end close includes many departments and users that don’t typically interact, so they tend to work in silos during the close. This lack of collaboration is inefficient, causing missed or delayed deadlines as well as a lack of accountability. Task Manager fosters collaboration by providing a shared platform for teams to communicate, to establish task ownership and prioritization, and to escalate issues quickly.
  
  
• Auditors require visibility into all tasks, who completed them and when. Task Manager keeps a detailed record of each step, its status, and who completed it, providing an audit trail with complete transparency and compliance controls.

During the year-end close, companies run and rerun consolidations and calculations frequently, refreshing results each time users load revised data into the application. Some of these processes run on a schedule, while others are triggered manually by users. When so many people are using the system simultaneously, they often overlap, which impacts performance. If any of these consolidations are particularly slow or are running in parallel, users get frustrated waiting for a progress meter to reach 100%. At first glance these delays may seem inconsequential, but the combined individual inefficiencies have a snowball effect, slowing the overall process significantly.

Another common pitfall during the close is that calculations might return unexpected results, or break altogether and halt consolidations until they’re remedied. Isolating and fixing these issues can be difficult and time-consuming. Of course, issues can crop up at any time, but they tend to happen most often at year end, when the accounting team can least afford it. Many rules only run once per year in December, so they aren’t regularly tested as part of the monthly close.

CompIntelligence’s team of OneStream experts can help your company address these challenges, which are especially time-sensitive during the close. We work closely with Administrators to rapidly identify and triage broken formulas and processes.

To take a more proactive approach to these types of issues, let us schedule a performance review of your application to address problems before they delay your close. We analyze the longest-running formulas, identify calculation overlaps and redundancies, and focus on the root causes of efficiency challenges. Our experts then use this information to optimize your application’s performance, focusing on the most memory-intensive processes like consolidations, data loads, and reporting.

Sarbanes-Oxley requires companies to reconcile GL accounts with supporting documentation, and then to verify that the transactions match between two or more systems. For most organizations, this involves repeated iterations of many slow, manual, complex steps, using fragmented spreadsheets or point solutions.

Our clients have been implementing OneStream Financial Close, to avoid wrangling data together in costly external systems. OFC bundles together two MarketPlace solutions: Account Reconciliations and Transaction Matching, which allow companies to simplify and automate processes while providing the necessary visibility, standardization, efficiency and control.

Our clients have achieved remarkable time and cost savings by leveraging OneStream for their reconciliation, because it already houses their consolidated financial results. Account Reconciliations and Transaction Matching simply unify and link these activities with the rest of the close.

OFC extends the platform and delivers the OneStream features you love and already know how to use: built-in audit and compliance functionality, standardized but customizable Workflows, data quality, accurate results, and flexible reporting. Because these solutions are truly integrated, you can do more in less time: for example, risk management reporting enables faster identification of material weaknesses in the financial process. The ability to drill directly to reconciliations from financial reports saves hours of research.

This is far from an exhaustive list of common year-end bottlenecks. Every organization has its own disorganized and disconnected processes that slow down the close and make life harder for the team. At CompIntelligence, we see challenges like these all the time, and we have the experience and expertise to tackle them for you.

Let’s sit down together so you can explain what makes your January so difficult. We love making our clients’ jobs easier by improving applications and shortening close cycles.

This year, let our experts help you relieve those year-end headaches!