HBR Analytic Services Report: Focus Finance on Digital Transformation and Agile Planning

"There's never been a more important or necessary time for companies to remain agile and adaptable," states Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in its new report "Digitally Transforming Finance into a Strategic Business Partner." "By prioritizing digital transformation and adopting agile planning solutions, finance leaders can help their organizations make better decisions faster and stay competitive."

The report, which surveyed 265 members of the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services audience, finds that an important goal of some finance digital transformation projects is to make a company's processes for planning and consolidation-core aspects of FP&A-work together seamlessly.

Planning involves analyzing the organization's financial status and goals to determine how best to reach those goals; consolidation is about combining several sources of the organization's financial data for corporate and regulatory reporting purposes.

Unifying Financial Planning and Consolidation

The survey finds that when the two processes work in concert, there are improvements in speed, insight, and accuracy. This becomes even more crucial as organizational complexity increases.

For example, Equiniti Group, a provider of professional shareholder, pension, and remediation services, had evolved from being a public limited company to being owned by a private equity firm, and then it was merged with AST, a provider of investing and analytics services for companies and mutual funds. These shifts meant that Equiniti had multiple accounting ledgers to integrate with one another as well as with numerous peripheral systems, such as invoice management, that were providing relevant data.

The company set out to bring all these processes together in one place. By unifying the various processes, Equiniti has improved the finance team's ability to dig into deeper financial insights, such as understanding how particular invoices relate to specific products and which products are driving revenue.

An important goal of finance digital transformation projects is to make a company's processes for planning and consolidation work together seamlessly.

The Risk of Falling Behind

According to the HBR report, those companies that delay their digital finance transformation, on the other hand, risk falling behind competitors due to slower decision-making or the inability to get crucial business insights fast enough.

To learn more about the benefits of unifying financial planning and consolidation, see our new infographic.