Doing more with less is the defining characteristic of finance and accounting departments in midsize enterprises, which ISG research defines as organizations with between 100 and 999 workers. One frustrating truth confronting executives in these organizations is that, once their company stops being a small business, it has many of the same challenges that large enterprises face but with fewer resources to deal with them. Over the past two decades, advances in information technology have had the...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Consolidate and Close Management
Agents are all the rage—and for a good reason. They are a way to automate work almost effortlessly so that repetitive and boring tasks get done with the least amount of effort on the part of the operator. In business, agents can be a boon for customer satisfaction and a way to improve worker productivity. They are alluring, with an almost unlimited number of potential use cases.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
digital finance,
Work Management,
Generative AI,
AI and Machine Learning,
Digital Applications,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
Prophix launched its Prophix One platform earlier this year. CFOs of midsize enterprises should take a look at it because it supports a more effective approach to finance and accounting operations in growing companies. It facilitates the transition of organizations that can no longer make do with work-arounds of existing systems to those with formal, controlled core processes that can be completed faster with reduced risk. The platform performs financial consolidation, account reconciliation...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
AI and Machine Learning,
Consolidate and Close Management
I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Financial Consolidation and Close: ISG and Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG and Ventana Research.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Consolidate and Close Management
Until recently, dedicated consolidation software had been a sleepy category. First introduced in the 1980s as a tool designed to run on personal computers (freeing the accounting department from reliance on its IT department), offerings basically achieved feature and function parity by the next decade. The last major technology innovation—moving the software to the cloud—began in the mid-2000s. Cloud-based software reduces the cost and complexity of ownership, making dedicated software a more...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Consolidate and Close Management
Oracle held an industry analyst summit recently where the focus was on artificial intelligence (AI) and embedded AI. At the event, Oracle demonstrated progress in adding useful AI-enabled capabilities to its business applications, especially in finance and accounting, supply chain, HR and revenue management. To put this into context, across the software industry, AI is already at work in many finance-focused applications that are currently available, albeit often in limited release. We are in...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Analytics,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
AI,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
AI and Machine Learning,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
We’re quickly approaching the moment when it becomes clear that artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) will not be free. As that happens, we will discover who’s willing to pay how much and for what. After nearly 18 months of unlimited use-case fantasizing, it should be obvious that not all the potential applications of AI can be realized over the next three to five years because they fail a cost/benefit test. In theory, AI’s potential is almost limitless, but so far, little...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Analytics,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
AI,
digital finance,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
After a year of near-constant AI chatter, the broad strokes of how the technology will roll out in business over the next three to five years are coming into place. It’s almost trite but worth repeating that artificial intelligence will drive a substantial boost in productivity as it’s adopted. Rather than making large swathes of jobs obsolete, it will take the robotic work out of those job descriptions, enabling people to focus on tasks with a greater economic return.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
AI,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
With a year of AI-everywhere-all-the-time chatter now in the rearview mirror, finance and accounting department executives appear to be in a state of apprehension and well-tuned skepticism about the impact this technology will have on their organization. There are solid reasons to believe that the next few years will be transformative, making it important for departments to adopt a fast-follower approach to artificial intelligence. Rather than being a laggard, leaders must be ready to take...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management