According to a recent study by EY, 65 percent of CFOs say that standardizing and automating processes and building agility and quality into those processes will be a significant priority for tomorrow’s finance function and for a good reason.¹ In recent years, RPA has become an increasingly popular choice for automating the financial close. In fact, on average, the RPA market has increased with an annual 50 percent global growth rate.² – and the companies that strategically implement RPA have seen their processes being performed up to 20 times faster.³

However, while RPA has the ability to reallocate the time of finance teams away from manually processing and toward higher-value tasks such as data analysis and gaining actionable insights, it doesn’t necessarily do so on its own. As the finance function increasingly leverages technology to transform its ability to be both effective and efficient, some finance teams are still spending a significant amount of time managing, often manually, numerous tasks critical to the close process in disparate systems.

Manual intervention not only wastes time that could be better spent elsewhere by your accountants, but it creates multiple fail points and potentially damaging risk in the financial close process. And oftentimes the manual intervention caused by a disconnected multi-system close process leads to inaccuracies in financial statements and offers nothing in the ways of:

• Visibility and Control
• Policy, Quality and Audit Management
• Supporting Evidence
• Reporting and Aging
• Risk Assessment

Beyond that, it’s now clear that manual processing is impacting the strategic insights that an organization can have on its financials. A recent study by CPA Practice Advisors found that 60 percent of CFOs believe data integration is the primary technology hurdle standing in the way of gaining actionable information for reports. And the primary way data integration was rectified in that situation was manual data processing.⁴

For these reasons, Trintech has developed the Cadency Close Action Plan Router (APR). Cadency’s Close APR prevents the inaccuracies in your financial statements that are all-too-often caused by a disconnected, multi-system close process by providing automated workflows for these tasks that would ordinarily require extra, potentially manual, decision-making steps. Additionally, the push API within Cadency Close APR allows for Cadency to communicate with and trigger bots within an organization’s ERP, to not only streamline the close process but ensure that both your system of record and Cadency’s System of Controls maintain accurate and identical records of your close process.

Ultimately, Cadency’s APR:

• Alleviates time spent manually closing tasks
• Improves staff productivity allowing your team to focus on more strategic efforts
• Improves accuracy by decreasing the need for manual management and intervention
• Reduces reliance on internal IT
• Prevents inaccuracies caused by a disconnected multi-system close process

Unlike other solutions with limited support for third-party systems, Cadency Close APR supports any ERP or external system, ensuring tasks across business units, regardless of system type or instance, are updated. Cadency Close APR makes tasks that occur outside of Cadency visible in the Cadency Console, further increasing your visibility and governance across your finance organization globally.

To learn about the impact that Cadency’s Close APR can have on your office of finance, check out our brochure.

Additional Resources:

• Five Signs that Your Financial Close Process May Be Broken (And What You Can Do About It)
• Closer to Excellence

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[1] Klimas, T. (April 11, 2019). “ DNA of the CFO: Is the future of finance new technology or new people?” Retrieved February 3rd, 2020, EY

[2] ATKearney (2018). “Robotic Process Automation: The impact of RPA on finance back-office processes” Retrieved February 3rd, 2020, ATKearney

[3] Major (June 29, 2018) Robotic Process Automation: A more efficient back office. Retrieved February 7, 2019, Major

[4] CPA Practice Advisor (March 1, 2017) “Only 17% of Finance Team Time Spent on Strategic Activities” Retrieved February 3rd, 2020, CPA Practice Advisor