Before the current global crisis, what issues did your company face within your Record to Report, and how many are due to a lack of visibility and control? More often than not, offices of finance are using spreadsheets in their Record to Report processes, and spreadsheets weren’t originally created to provide a direct line of sight into the complex financial processes they tend to be used for currently. Most visibility and control issues stem from the use of spreadsheets, which cause even more complications when you must utilize this already inefficient tool from separate remote work locations, where communication and collaboration are already difficult, at best.

If you’re facing the following issues in your remote office of finance, it’s time to re-evaluate how productive spreadsheets truly are for your financial processes.

Workflow Complications

As your company performs much of your Record to Report process from their own separate locations, following pre-determined processes and policies is more important than ever and spreadsheets aren’t set up to enforce these.

This lack of standardization across your entire workflow becomes even more complicated when multiple users, departments or entities utilize different procedures and templates. Coupled with the absence of a single place to monitor and manage the entire Record to Report, the risk being created for your organization grow significantly. Additionally, it becomes more difficult to identify and resolve bottlenecks, such as procedural problems like performing unnecessary activities and uneven task distribution. Without real-time visibility, your office of finance loses the timeliness and accuracy with which all your financial processes should comply.

Inconsistent Control Framework

The absence of process standardization not only impacts workflow but your compliance framework. With spreadsheets, it’s almost impossible to promote accountability for each team member, since spreadsheets don’t track who does what within a document. This is especially true with the majority of your staff working remotely, due to a diminished ability to communicate and a significant decrease in oversight.

Additionally, the lack of a continuous documentation trail makes the auditing process messier and more complicated, potentially driving up your risk for non-compliance with governmental or SEC regulations, fraud and misstatement.

Lack of Scalability

As your company develops, you want a financial tool that will not only enable growth but also grow alongside your organization. Spreadsheets were created to manage a common household’s budget, not to service the needs of a sizeable company, so they can’t accommodate your dynamic circumstances. Spreadsheets can “grow”, in the sense that more spreadsheets are created that are stuffed to the brim with data. However, this complexity leads to a higher risk of failure points— something that your company can’t afford, especially during this period of global crisis.

No Real-Time Data Insights

Lastly, spreadsheets don’t provide your company with the analytics it requires to make critical decisions. Especially in the current business climate, your company needs real-time data insights to make quick, high-risk judgments, and basing these decisions off numbers from your spreadsheets is incredibly risky. Spreadsheets often contain inaccurate data that goes unnoticed until it’s too late and a misstatement needs to be filed. Not only can this cost your company financially, but the impending results of decisions made off those numbers could do much more than monetary damage.

How Automation Resolves These Issues

Automating your Record to Report process simplifies your team’s workflow to reduce complexity and complications, adheres to company financial procedures and provides real-time data analytics. Cadency by Trintech provides standardized process templates within the software to enforce pre-existing compliance frameworks and automatically creates an audit trail, reducing the risk of misstatements and additional audit costs. Additionally, the dashboard in Cadency provides a snapshot of your entire R2R process and offers real-time insight into your financials with the ability to drill down into individual transactions. Shifting your company’s financial data from disparate spreadsheets to a single repository allows for more visibility into task assignments and progress, and ongoing process improvements, so that your team members are always working on necessary tasks.

To learn more about how Cadency can enable your Record to Report process from remote work locations, read our brochure.

Written by: Ashton Mathai