FINANCE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Many Finance executives find themselves plagued by the complexity of their financial information. Some have built “fiefdoms of brute force” manual effort to ensure that the numbers are correct, but at the cost of highly talented people, thousands of hours and hundreds of spreadsheets. On the other hand, some are still relying upon legacy procedures and processes effective when the company was half the size and less complex. Many have invested in “top-side” tools that corporate finance can use to consolidate the financials, but really glosses over the issue of a CFO “flying blind” as he/she relates to taking the pulse of the business and the resulting financial implications on an on-going basis.

Information transparency can only come from addressing the flow of financial information in an end-to-end manner. What does this mean? It entails ensuring that source transactions are coded appropriately, and without error, at the source. It entails automating the flows of this data to the financial subsystems without manual intervention. It requires a highly integrated and robust data warehousing strategy that can house and manage the “single version of the truth”, as well as purpose-built applications that support each Finance function (e.g. Tax, Accounting, Treasury, Planning, etc.). Last, it requires a workflow capability such that exception or control issues are flagged and delivered to the correct individual on a real-time basis.

Unrealizable? Great Finance functions are on this path, and redefining the nature of the function through the process.

Archstone Consulting works with our clients to develop the right information architecture strategy. This allows our clients to implement a phased approach while still focused on a pragmatic end state.