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Whether you bear comprehensive responsibility for the finance function or lead a part of the team focused on your own area of operational excellence, your role is fundamentally about balancing risk with opportunities to spur greater performance. The burden of managing financial risk, cash flow, strategic investment and compliance is a complex job, involving a broad spectrum of responsibilities.
How can you be confident that the risks of fraud, error and abuse are being well-managed without getting in the way of achieving your performance objectives? The typical approach is to rely on the types of internal controls that are built into processes, and in particular, into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. But in reality, how dependable is this approach?
Think about it: central to understanding where you stand is your reliance on what your ERP system is telling you. But it’s difficult (dare I say impossible) to effectively control business processes and stop leakage from within such a complex platform.
How can you achieve an optimum balance between running a high-performance financial process and efficiently managing the gaps that exist in your ERP-centric controls?
The answer is in your data. It’s no secret that technology and “big data” analysis has done much to transform marketing and the insights that can be achieved into areas such as customer behavior, product requirements and market opportunities. Business intelligence (BI) software has likewise illuminated performance at a high level.
What’s in it for you? Risk analytics, monitoring and risk visualization, closely integrated into risk and control management systems, has a comparable ability to transform the effectiveness of financial control systems—providing a balance between the goals of tight control and maximizing performance.
In fact, data analysis can provide an additional, compensating layer of control over financial processes—enabling ERP systems to be very productive and efficient, while reducing risks such as fraud, error, abuse and regulatory non-compliance.
If you engage external auditors, make no mistake: they are utilizing this technology. And the highest-performing finance and control teams are now running similar analytics, not only to improve controls and strategic risk management, but also as best practices to help ensure the “audit readiness” of the organization.
In this eBook, we’ll share with you the finance leader’s guide to understanding the natural gaps in your ERP system—and the specific actions you can take to grab risk by the scruff of the neck so you can focus on maximizing performance. This eBook will also cover:
- Methods to illuminate risks in finance and accounting systems
- 7 performance hacks to improve risk management and reporting
- A technology buying guide for risk and control management and analytic monitoring
- How to understand the gaps in your ERP system
Download your copy here.