In recent years, incorporating cloud computing into everyday business practices has become more prevalent, especially in the office of finance. Not only are on-premises data environments more expensive to update and house in the long-term, but they can’t deliver comparable benefits to the Cloud when it comes to your organization’s financial close process.

The Cloud does more for your close than spreadsheets ever will when coupled with financial automation.

Close Process Optimization

One of the biggest benefits of investing in financial automation with cloud computing capabilities is the efficiency it brings to your close process. Automating tasks that require less human judgement—such as transaction matching—in the Cloud will reduce the amount of attention accountants must dedicate to tedious tasks while speeding up your close. It also reduces the likelihood that bottlenecks, such as rework, will slow down your close since financial automation can enforce a workflow process based on organization-specific policies and procedures. When your financial processes are housed, standardized and streamlined in the Cloud, your close time decreases significantly and your F&A team can focus on more strategic tasks to enhance the organization.

Improved Organizational Visibility

Moving your financial processes to the Cloud also gives your F&A teams increased visibility. The ability to look at your finances either granularly or on a wider scale enhances both the timeliness and accuracy of your financial close. Additionally, financial automation paired with cloud computing means an automated audit trail. Long gone are the days of complex spreadsheet mountains or piles of binders stuffed to the brim— the ability to access financial reporting on-demand will decrease your audit time and expenses. Imagine being able to give finance leaders and stakeholders the real-time data insights they request quickly and easily. Because of this, cloud computing gives your organization a competitive edge in the market that it would struggle to achieve without the Cloud.

Growth Capabilities

Partnering cloud capabilities with financial automation provides a solid foundation for your organization to grow. Typically, organizations perform their financial processes with spreadsheets—an inefficient tool that only promotes the use of tedious, manual processes that can’t scale easily. Spreadsheets weren’t inherently created to service a complex organization’s finances—much less grow and scale with it. Financial processes completed within spreadsheets tend to lack standardization and become an inefficient patchwork of differing spreadsheet formats, based on the preferences of each individual accountant, that only becomes more complicated and unmanageable as the company grows.

Cloud-based financial automation can grow with your organization and the automation component works to make your close process less complex, as well as shorten the time it takes your F&A team to close.

The Adra Suite works to reduce the amount of time your accountants spend on manual processes such as reconciliation and transaction matching, while improving the accuracy of your financials. The cloud-based software gives your organization several advantages that spreadsheets simply cannot provide.

To learn more about the benefits cloud-based financial automation brings to your organization, explore the Adra Suite.

Written by: Ashton Mathai