The 6 must-haves in Prophix One™

The adage of ‘doing more with less’ is still very relevant. Often, spreadsheets are the go-to solution for managing processes like planning, reporting, account reconciliation, and financial consolidation.  Before you know it, spreadsheets become a source of truth, which inevitably leads to challenges like version control, bad data, deletions, time lost, confusion, back and forth, and a lack of trust in the data. And as the business grows, spreadsheets become harder to maintain and scale.

With more vendors offering solutions to help overcome these challenges, it’s easy for CFOs to fall into the trap of acquiring multiple tools to address different needs. Unfortunately, the ‘acquire a new tool for a new problem’ strategy can cause unexpected problems. Over time, this can lead to integration headaches, data silos, and increased complexity managing and maintaining these disparate systems.

An Activant Research Survey shows that the average finance and accounting team juggles 20 software vendors. That’s 20 different contracts to manage, 20 different user interfaces, 20 different data integrations, and 20 different security methods.

Today, we’ll look at Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform, the available solutions – and why finance leaders should look to a fully integrated platform to manage all their finance processes.

Why CFOs are reevaluating their software stack

Juggling all these vendors has come to a head, and CFOs are now realizing the benefit of investing in an integrated financial platform—and for a number of reasons.   Integrated platforms eliminate data silos, integration headaches, and complexity. You have one single entry point, one user authentication experience, and a single common UI, which helps with onboarding and training for finance teams – and quicker time to value. In short, an integrated platform acts as one central hub for your financial data. Let’s look at the data behind why CFOs are reevaluating their software stack:

• 76% of CFOs agree that without “one version of the truth” across business units, they will struggle to meet their objectives. – Accenture 2023 Survey

• 70-80% of CFOs expressed interested in switching to a single vendor that provided an integrated offering. – Bain Capital 2023 Survey

• “There is an increasing desire among CFOs for platform solutions with best-in-class functionality that serve as the single source of truth across business units and the entire OCFO tech stack.” – LEK Consulting

How to align finance technology with your business needs

According to IBM, finance transformation is “the combination of processes, systems, and organizational change across a business, which is implemented through new technologies, training, and analysis.”

Your transformation journey starts with understanding your financial maturity. Financial maturity measures the sophistication of your finance processes. You can measure your financial maturity by looking at your finance processes on a sliding scale and understanding where your current approach fits.

The 6 must-have solutions in Prophix One™

Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform, will solve for the disparate tech stack by enabling CFO’s with a seamless experience across the platform, from financial close to planning. Your processes are interconnected and the way you manage them should be as well. No more jumping in and out of applications to manage workflows, security, and processes—with Prophix One everything is fully integrated in one platform.

The word “platform” is often overused. Simply put, it refers to a collection of applications on the same cloud provider. What makes Prophix One, a true state-of-the-art experience for customers is combining our core platform capabilities under one point of entry, including:

• Financial Data Integration: This is critically important to achieving the single version of the truth that CFOs are striving for. With Prophix One, Data Integration brings your data onto the platform in a central staging database that you can share across applications. This ensures all applications and all users are reading from the same playbook.
• Single entry point and consistent user interface: One single point of entry into the platform, through the Prophix One Portal, simplifies access and authentication, and allows you to also move seamlessly between applications. The consistent user interface simplifies training and makes it easy to onboard new employees and access new functionality.

• Workflow, security & user management: Offering a single point of user authentication and centralized user management, Prophix One is ultra-adaptable and fits within any finance department securely, making it easy to collaborate and share data not only across applications, but business units and functional areas too.

Now, let’s look at the applications that are available on Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform.

Prophix One Financial Consolidation

Managing financial consolidation for groups of companies or overseeing multiple branches across numerous locations can be a logistical nightmare. Between multiple legal entities, intercompany eliminations, various regulatory and management reporting requirements (including US GAAP, IFRS, Multi-GAAP and local statutory requirements), mergers and acquisitions, foreign currency translations, and expense allocations, consolidation complexity makes it increasingly difficult to get a comprehensive view of your financial performance.

Prophix One Financial Consolidation simplifies and shortens close windows by eliminating manual processes and automating the recurring ones, so you spend less time looking back and more time planning for the future. Automation gives you the ability to run complex consolidations in mere seconds and gain insights that drive better business outcomes, while maintaining complete auditability, resulting in a faster, more accurate, and confident close processes.

Prophix One Financial Planning & Analysis

Budgeting and planning can be a time-consuming, manual process. Business growth or changing market dynamics also adds complexity to budgeting, making it harder to manage. And budgeting using only spreadsheets can introduce additional complications, risk for human-error, and delays in an already complicated process.

With Prophix One Financial Planning and Analysis, you can take the pain out of your current budgeting processes. Now, you can modernize your planning needs by centralizing your data, streamlining your processes, reducing human error, and enabling automatic consolidation, so you can plan with greater speed, accuracy, and agility.

Prophix One Intercompany Management

Intercompany reconciliation can be a slow, tedious task, which is especially challenging for groups who use different ERP systems, employ manual processes, or execute large volumes of transactions. Bottlenecks in other processes, like reconciliations, are often the reason why financial close is slow and inefficient.

Prophix One Intercompany Management reduces the risk of error and delays by providing a uniquely collaborative environment, which allows for entities to start the reconciliation process with group oversight. Data accuracy and traceability, combined with quick issue detection and resolution, ensures organizations can reconcile effectively and focus their efforts on consolidation and close.

Prophix One Account Reconciliation

Navigating the complexities of reconciling entities and managing your close processes can be daunting. Prophix One Account Reconciliation accelerates your reconciliation processes by automating tasks, leveraging efficient workflows, and giving you a comprehensive view of your close processes. Finance leaders can confidently execute reconciliations with precision and produce timely and accurate financial statements for informed decision-making.

Prophix One Integrated Business Planning

Prophix One Integrated Business Planning allows for massive datasets and complex use cases and supports the Office of the CFO with advanced solutions. By integrating centralized operational planning within the finance department, you can streamline processes, reduce errors, and expand possibilities. Prophix One Data Integration simplifies the connection and exchange of data between Prophix One and other business systems, so that everyone is using the same single, unified view of financial truth.

Prophix One Reporting & Analytics

Prophix One Reporting & Analytics provides you with crucial insights into your business, without the hassle of data gathering and validation or report building and formatting. You can build ad-hoc analysis database analytics in seconds, with the ability to drill up or down to see the details you need, pivot to change your perspective of the data, or get into the transactional details that make up the balances you use.

Best practices for adopting a new finance technology

Finance as we know it is changing. There’s a growing appetite for innovative processes, fresh perspectives, and game-changing technology to reshape the function. But the Office of the CFO stands at a crossroads between the tradition and transformation. How do you usher in an era of change and potential? Here are the steps you can take to ensure a successful adoption of an integrated platform.

Understand stakeholder needs

If you’ve spent any time researching finance software, you’re familiar with the number of options on the market. Some vendors specialize in budgeting and planning and others in consolidation and financial close. Now that integrated platform vendors are starting to emerge, it’s important to understand the needs of various stakeholders across finance and accounting.

. Business units and departments are no longer siloed. With an integrated platform you’re able to connect your people and processes. It’s important to note that you don’t have to jump feet first when investing in an integrated platform. Many organizations start small by implementing a single application on the platform, and then expand into other applications as their business grows and scales.

Plan for implementation

In the 2023 Global Finance Leaders Survey, we found that skills and training are a barrier to automation in the Office of the CFO. It’s imperative when adopting an integrated platform that you plan out your implementation and onboarding process.

When adopting an integrated platform, finance leaders should take a structured and strategic approach to ensure a smooth and successful implementation. They should:

• Define clear objectives: Align with business goals, identify what specific business outcomes they want to achieve by implementing the integrated platform.
• Engage stakeholders early: Involve key departments early, including finance, IT, security, and operations teams to ensure you meet their requirements and expectations.
• Create a detailed implementation plan: Consider a phased approach, starting with the core platform capabilities that help with your objectives.
• Collaborate with your provider: Work closely with your provider to understand their support structure, SLA’s, professional services, integrations and more.

Determine how to measure success

CFOs and business leaders should measure the success of their integrated platform implementation by focusing on key metrics and outcomes that align with their corporate strategic goals. Whether that be driving revenue growth, customer retention rates, or production efficiency.

• Efficiency and time savings: While it can sometimes be difficult to measure time savings, a successful implementation should streamline workflows and accelerate your processes.
• Data accuracy and consistency: Track the number of financial errors, discrepancies, and corrections required after implementation. Your integrated platform should lead to fewer mistakes due to automation and improved data management.
• User adoption and satisfaction: Track how quickly and effectively the finance team and other stakeholders adopt the integrated platform. A smooth transition with high adoption rates reflects successful onboarding.
• Improved decision-making: Your integrated platform should support faster, more informed decision-making, through improved access to real-time data analytics and reporting.
• Cost savings and ROI: Measure the financial return from the implementation by comparing the cost savings, efficiencies gained, and any revenue growth enabled by the platform.

Conclusion: Find the right Prophix One™ solution for you

Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform, solves the disparate tech stack that CFO’s are managing by enabling them with a seamless experience from financial close to planning. No more jumping in and out of applications to manage workflows, security, and processes.

With Prophix One, our integrated platform, you can easily manage your close, reporting, and planning processes with ease by leveraging our core platform capabilities that simplify Data Integration, user management, and workflows.