Financial close software makes it simple to perform financial close activities in a streamlined fashion. These tools are able to integrate with your existing systems to pull data, perform tasks, and generate reports on an as-needed basis.
Here, we will share all you need to know about financial close software, including how to choose the best platform for your business.
Coming Up
1. What is Financial Close Software?
2. What are the Top 5 Financial Close Tools?
3. Why Use Financial Close Software?
4. Who Uses Financial Close Tools?
5. What Are Common Features of Financial Close Tools?
6. What are Services Related to Financial Close?
7. What Factors to Consider Comparing Financial Close Software?
What is Financial Close Software?
Also called accounting close software, financial close software consists of tools and technology that aid in the execution of financial close. Financial close generally occurs at the end of each month to zero out account balances (i.e. revenues and expenses) and update the Retained Earnings account in the ledger to match the end-of-period balance.
Accountants can utilise these software systems to reconcile accounts, approve expenses, fulfill bill payment, and all other exercises necessary to prepare accounts for the next month of transactions.
Automation platforms such as SolveXia alleviate the manual duties of accountants to free up their time to spend on more analytical and strategic activities.
What are the Top 5 Financial Close Tools?
There are different platforms on the market that provide end-to-end finance automation, including those that are specifically tailored to manage financial close.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular and widely used options:
1. SolveXia
SolveXia is a finance automation platform that specialises in financial close, reconciliations, and accounting services. With the cloud-based solution, your finance team and accountants can maximise productivity and efficiency.
The solution is able to perform end-to-end automation, which streamlines workflows and removes bottlenecks. With governance by design, you can utilise the software to manage all your accounting close processes while also leveraging real-time reports.
The data is always up-to-date, centralised, and secure, which allows your organisation to remain agile and adaptive to evolving needs and goals.
2. BlackLine
BlackLine is a market leader in finance and accounting automation. The software provides the ability to automate accounting activities, streamline reporting, and centralise data. BlackLine can help with important processes, like: account reconciliations, journal entry, task management, variance analysis, transaction matching, and more.
3. Workiva
Workiva is a popular software used by enterprises globally to aid with compliance and reporting. The financial close management software provides many services, such as: board reporting, investor relations, SEDAR reporting, government reporting, internal controls, SEC reporting, stress tests, enterprise risk management, internal audit management, and more.
4. Oracle
Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close is a cloud-based platform that minimises risk, increases accuracy, and makes it easy to track the progress of financial close. The solution is a subscription based option offered by Oracle Cloud. Some of its features are: automated cash flow, dashboard and analysis, process task management, and supplemental schedule data management.
5. Redwood
Redwood Finance Automation is designed to support four main functions of finance teams and financial close, namely: record to report, order to cash, procure to pay and asset accounting. The system not only removes the need to manually manage processes, but it also takes advantage of data to create corporate reports.
Why Use Financial Close Software?
Using financial close software removes the hassle from performing financial close on a regular basis. With financial close automation, account reconciliation can be performed in seconds rather than days. Instead of relying on an individual or team of people to source data, match transactions, investigate discrepancies, and update accounts again, the software can carry out the process accurately and quickly.
The benefits of using financial close software are plenty. Not only do you free up your team’s time to spend on higher-level tasks, but you also add transparency into your organisation. Any individual with access control can check on a process, review accounts, and even receive automated reports as desired.
This also helps to reduce costs as less time is spent on financial close processes. Furthermore, you reduce the inherent risk that could be the cause of costly fines or sanctions, should any data be accidentally reported incorrectly.
With financial close software, you have better compliance and access to advanced analytics. These analytics can help you prepare better for the future, detect fraud early on, and allocate resources in the most optimal way.
The financial close process should be standardised and easy to replicate each time. But, when performed manually, this can be difficult to achieve for obvious reasons. Using an automation software like SolveXia will make it so that all of your finance functions are customised, then standardised, and repeatable.
Who Uses Financial Close Tools?
Financial close software is utilised by finance teams, accountants, controllers, and professionals who take part in the financial close process. From individual freelancers to enterprise teams, financial close software makes accounting simpler and more efficient.
What Are Common Features of Financial Close Tools?
Financial close consists of several different business processes that must be performed with utmost precision and care. The common features that these automation tools provide are:
- Consolidation: Regardless of size, most organisations have financial information across systems and within different departments, or sometimes even subsidiary companies. Automation software can pull data from multiple systems to centralise all the information you need to complete workflows.
- Workflows: Speaking of workflows, you can design custom workflows in these systems to automation processes. This not only helps to assign responsibility and boost ownership, but it also makes it easy for CFOs and leadership to oversee the progress of important workflows.
- Reconciliation: Account reconciliation is imperative to ensure that your organisation’s financial situation is as it shows up on internal ledgers. By matching transactions with external sources, it’s possible to monitor improper spending, detect fraud, and ensure that account balances are right.
- Records Management: Along with regulatory compliance, it’s best to choose a software that allows for records management, which means it can withhold documents and checklists so that every team member has access to your organisation’s standards and protocols.
- Financial Insights: It’s safe to say that virtually every business decision involves the review of finances. As such, you want to make sure that financial data is always up-to-date and accurate. Then, you can utilise software’s ability to perform analytics so you can glean insights to inform your decisions.
- Integration: When you choose to use a tool like SolveXia, you can easily integrate the automation platform with your existing software and legacy systems, without risking losing any data.
- Review: Since every period’s finances rely on the last, the financial close processes must be reviewed and approved. However, it’s always a risk that human error will occur or there will be a delay. With an automation solution, the accuracy of the system is spot on, and the workflow moves through until approval is completed.
What are Services Related to Financial Close?
Along with financial close software, it’s beneficial to use automation software that can handle: budget and forecasting, corporate performance, and business finance.
With budget and forecasting software, finance teams are able to accurately create projections and forecasts based on historical data. The software also makes it easy to visualise the data with graphs, charts, and reports.
Corporate performance software facilitates communication between executives and finance departments so that decisions can be made on the most recent and relevant financial information available.
What Factors to Consider Comparing Financial Close Software?
When choosing the right financial close software for your organisation, it’s good to keep in mind the following features and capabilities:
- Scope: Do you want a financial close software that is solely focused on financial close or do you want a platform that can do that and more?
- Integrations: What other financial systems are already in place in the organisation, and can the new software tool integrate well?
- Scalability: If your business grows, is the software able to manage a high influx of data and still process information at quick speeds?
- Ease-of-use: Does your team need advanced technical knowledge to work within the system or is there a graphical interface that makes it simple?
Closing Thoughts
Financial close software will elevate your organisation. Along with easing the workload of your finance team and/or accountant, you’ll be able to connect all your systems and improve transparency within your entire organisation.
Given the importance of finances and financial close, every department can benefit from the addition of a financial close software. There’s no better time than now to get started– book a demo today and see how financial close software can improve your organisation.
