Producing complete monthly balance sheets as fast as possible (fast closing) has become a major challenge for many finance managers.
Even beyond regulation concerns, in an ever-changing economic environment, the aim of fast closing is to provide operational departments and finance management with essential decision-making information which needs to be delivered faster and with greater precision every time.
These quality and time requirements make it essential to approach the matter from a different angle, thinking more and more ahead of closing activities, monitoring and controlling the entire closing process in great detail, and in collaboration with operational branches – which are often involved in the critical phases of account closing.
Many Finance Directors consider fast closing but do not know how to achieve it.
Here is some advice from client feedback on fast closing:
- Identify processes, actors, information flows, applications and documents involved in the closing process.
- Establish a complete diagnosis and identify: information and resource bottlenecks, activities yielding no added value, activities that could be moved upstream, issues with coordination, information systems or documents.
- Are you having trouble with the advice above? No worries. You should already know what is going wrong. Start from the ideal closing process. Yes, the perfect one, finished after 3 days.
- Rethink and simplify your fast closing process, as if it involved less people, speaking the same language, with mutual objectives and a fully functional IS.
- Technology is there to help you. Your processes can be operated, monitored and optimized on the fly. The information you depend on can be available even before initiating the closing process (stocks, commitments, invoices, salary costs, mutual account arrangements…)
- Try things out, measure, perform and start optimizing account closing sustainably. Maybe one day this can all be done in real-time, but for now you are already fast closing.
ROK Solution provides many ways to help you achieve fast closing.
- ROK Solution allows to integrate your company’s structure, systems, processes, ERM and task references into an Integrated Management System. Very soon, you can be presented with a solution that will help you go through the first two steps of your fast closing project.
- Your processes can be realigned and redesigned easily: you can then focus on the who-what-when, and deploy new collaboration solutions in a few clicks. How does it work? ROK Solution integrates the most advanced process modeling tools, and provides smart content access management with the ROK3™ engine.
- Stop working day in day out on Aris, Mega or Visio. These overly complex tools waste your time, and fail to take the specificities of your organization into account. Get your licenses refunded, you will save time and money.
- Take control of your fast closing project. As you launch processes, all the involved people will receive tasks on their ROK dashboard, or by e-mail.
- Each task includes the information relevant to its realization, such as business rules, instructions, ERP, ERM, access rights and communication with the other actors involved.
You can now oversee the entire closing process, visualizing progress and difficulties encountered by your collaborators. You can easily weigh in to help those who need it, and follow-up on tasks that lag behind.
You can also measure KPI, identify points of improvement for your processes and deploy them in a few clicks. You are in control.
