Your company’s financial close does not have to be a cumbersome process that forces your team to spend extra hours at the office, manually managing an ever-increasing flow of data. This white paper explores how companies can streamline financial close activities by adopting a solution that complements the spreadsheets you and your team are already with the robust, secure features of a traditional corporate performance management system.

1. How to Win the Battle
for Better Financial Close
Management
By: Gary Kantz, Director of Financial Close and
Consolidations,Vena Solutions

2. Every day, businesses are expanding through growth and acquisition.The
synergistic effect of expansion, the potential for increased revenue and profitability
and the benefits for shareholders can result in substantial dividends.
However, as a company grows and new entities and subsidiaries are added to the
mix, an entire host of operational problems can follow suit.
Suddenly, Finance departments must stay on top of 50, 100 or 500 business units.
Monitoring and controlling the flow of data for all these units becomes a drag on
the entire financial close management cycle.
What used to take a week to close the books now takes three weeks, if not more.
Imagine yourself closing the books of the current month while you’re still working
on the prior month. Unfortunately, this is an increasingly common situation.
Now, take a moment to think about the ramifications of not having control over all
these entities:
• You find yourself firing off emails and phone calls to controllers and
accounting managers all over the world, unable to get a handle on
who submitted data to headquarters for close and consolidation,
and when. Instead of spending time analyzing the data your company
depends on to make meaningful decisions, you watch your inbox steadily fill
with different versions of spreadsheets and are left to manually sort, filter and
grab accurate, up-to-date versions.
• Your numbers reside in an endless series of Excel spreadsheets, all
of which exist in different locations throughout the world. You must
manually determine the state of each template, a waste of your precious time.
• You begin to see another critical part of the process fall apart
altogether – the review and approval of the data at the subsidiary,
regional and parent company levels. Data that needs to be reviewed for
accuracy and completeness ends up in the cesspool of numbers that start to
lose their very meaning.
How to Win the Battle for Better Financial Close Management
© 2015 Vena Solutions Canada, Inc. 2

3. • When you need to make the critical decisions that help your
company grow and stay competitive, financial statements and other
critical reports are nowhere to be found. Your accountants are still
struggling to close and consolidate their books, so they are not generating
reports on a timely basis. By this time, you’re beginning to lose control over
your close process. Management needed numbers by the fifth business day,
the investors and lenders needed them by the middle of the month and the
government needs them by the twentieth day.What now?
Although many of you reading this may get a chuckle or two thinking that the
aforementioned scenario is extreme, I can tell you from experience that this
happens more often than you think. I would also be willing to bet that some of
you might even be cringing right about now – because I just described your close
process.
“When you lack tools that can control and grab validated,
auditable data, all of the benefits of growth and expansion
– revenues, earnings, shareholder satisfaction and the
potential for a competitive edge - fade away.”
© 2015 Vena Solutions Canada, Inc. 3
How to Win the Battle for Better Financial Close Management

4. When you lack tools that can control and grab validated, auditable data, all
of the benefits of growth and expansion – revenues, earnings, shareholder
satisfaction and the potential for a competitive edge - fade away. You become
locked in a vicious pattern of inefficiency, rising costs, frustrated accountants and
irritated managers.
Now, consider this: you have tools at your disposal that can maintain control
over all your entities, automatically ensuring data at the entity level is reviewed,
approved and submitted in a timely manner.
These tools also help you accelerate the close process, allowing you and your
team to get the job done faster than you could even before your company started
growing. It may sound like a pipe dream, but if you had a solution that contained
such tools, you could potentially close your books in a matter of days. Think
about all of the time you would have at your fingertips.You’d gain:
• More time to review and approve data.
• More time for financial analysis.
• More time to make the decisions that drive your company’s growth.
• The ability to better satisfy the needs of management, investors, lenders,
regulators, etc. by getting data into their hands more quickly.
• The ability to ease the burden on your company’s accountants, giving
them a better quality of life and reducing turnover.
• The ability to cut the cost of your close process to a fraction of what it
once was.
Unburdening Your Finance and Accounting Teams
© 2015 Vena Solutions Canada, Inc. 4
“What if, instead of
purchasing, being trained
on and maintaining an
unfamiliar system that can
only superficially re-create
the best-loved features of
Excel, you could continue
to work with your current
spreadsheets?”

5. Companies love Microsoft®
Excel®
– it is the de facto language of accounting
and finance departments. Excel’s 400+ pre-built and easy to use formulas are
leveraged by an estimated 500 million users across the globe to create incredibly
useful models of their data. Many Finance departments have used and enhanced
their Excel models over many, many years - likely decades - including those within
their financial close management (FCM) process.
While Excel is a major part of many companies’ close, the application alone is
not ideal for monitoring the status of FCM processes. The spreadsheet itself has
limited use as a tracking device, as it doesn’t provide for centralized tracking,
review or approval at different points in the financial close.
For this reason, some FCM solution vendors will encourage you to give up on
your spreadsheets and move from Excel into a new environment.Their solution
may contain the centralized tracking features and data controls you need, but will
not accommodate the countless models you and your team have worked so hard
to build and have come to rely upon.
Instead, you will be required to rebuild your models within the solution’s pre-
built programming framework. In the end, only a small group of people in your
company will likely understand the new formula language well enough to further
adapt the models. Do you want to work for your software, or do you want your
software to work for you?
Now, consider this:What if, instead of purchasing, being trained on and
maintaining an unfamiliar system that can only superficially re-create the
best-loved features of Excel, you could continue to work with your current
spreadsheets?
© 2015 Vena Solutions Canada, Inc. 5
To Excel or Not to Excel?
“Excel’s 400+ prebuilt and
easy to use formulas are
leveraged by an estimated
500 million users...to
create incredibly useful
models of their data.”

6. Vena Financial Close Management (FCM) is an all-encompassing solution
designed to help you more efficiently monitor, review and audit processes and
data at each stage of the financial close.The objective here is not to get rid of
your existing spreadsheets or systems, but to enhance them in such a way that
your close ceases to be a headache.
Gartner recently said the following:
Financial process and close management solutions present an
opportunity for finance strategists by providing controls throughout
the accounting period and improving enterprise collaboration.1
Thus, considering the implications outlined above, a controlled, structured FCM
solution solves the problem of accounting gridlock by automating critical financial
close management processes to quickly get accurate, meaningful information into
the hands of strategists and decision-makers.
“The most logical alternative...is working with an FCM
solution that leverages Excel as the front-end, but stores
data behind the scenes in a secure, centralized repository.”
Introducing a More Effective Way to Audit and Close your Books
© 2015 Vena Solutions Canada, Inc. 6
1
Gartner, Enhanced Finance Controls and Automation Fills the Gaps in ERP and CPM
Processes”, John E.Van Decker, Christopher Iervolino, 13 October 2014.

7. Consider for a moment the case of a company that uses hundreds of
spreadsheets to capture information about processes such as data loads,
intercompany eliminations, currency translation and reporting. As we’ve seen, if
you store data in separate Excel spreadsheets, you’re in for a big mess: because
your data is not stored in one central location, it cannot be easily accessed and
leveraged by users across the enterprise.
The most logical alternative to working with a mass of uncontrolled spreadsheets
is working with an FCM solution that leverages Excel as the front-end, but stores
data behind the scenes in a secure, centralized repository.
Access to stored data can be controlled through user-level security settings, thus
allowing users to only see slices of data that are relevant to their entities.
Further, users can perform faster, more powerful calculations and consolidations
when data is processed in the database itself, instead of Excel. In the end,
using Excel as a front-end accelerates your team’s ramp-up time and precludes
the need for extensive user training or heavily reliance on IT and/or external
consultants.
Business rules and custom workflows ensure your reports are accurate and submitted on time.
What does an effective FCM solution look like and why does it
matter to me?
© 2015 Vena Solutions Canada, Inc. 7

8. An effective FCM solution also includes a full audit trail and centralized
dashboard to take the guesswork out of where users are in the process. An
audit trail time-, user- and date-stamps data processes, while a dashboard allows
you to monitor entities, reviews, approvals - even the final delivery of the report
packages - to key shareholders.
An audit trail also allows CFOs, controllers and accounting managers to trace
every process back to its associated user(s) and approver(s), giving them a simple
and painless way to monitor and control the process to exact specifications.
Think about one ramification of not having an effective FCM solution:You’d have
to manually monitor the activity of managers and users and try to reach them
through emails and phone calls just to get them to move their process along.
The most important components of a
well-functioning FCM solution
An effective FCM solution automates the notification process – something that
takes the effort of follow-up out of the equation. It also automatically creates
and sends emails and text messages (generated on the basis of due dates and
other business rules) to users, reminding them to start, revise or complete their
assigned task(s).
Additionally, an effective FCM solution automatically records user activity in an
easy-to-read log to keep management in the loop and allow them to effortlessly
identify bottlenecks and take action to correct them.
Finally, an effective FCM solution is cloud-based, meaning it stores all your data
and templates in a secure, offsite server.
When working in the cloud, there is virtually no need for you to heavily rely on
your IT department or external consultants for hardware set-up, configuration
or maintenance. Updates to the cloud are automatic and performed in the
background, freeing up time for your IT department to focus on other, more
pressing matters in their group.
© 2015 Vena Solutions Canada, Inc. 8
What does an effective FCM solution look like and why does it
matter to me?

9. © 2015 Vena Solutions Canada, Inc. 9
Conclusions
To summarize, implementing an effective FCM solution and strategy will alleviate
the stress and eliminate the inefficiencies that threaten the accuracy and
timeliness of your financial close management processes.
Your close can be accelerated to the point where the effort is reduced from weeks
to days, or even mere hours. Up-to-date information can get into the hands
of management faster so they can make informed decisions and maintain an
invaluable advantage over competitors.
Moreover, the cost of your close process decreases dramatically with an effective
FCM solution and strategy – so does the effort you must put forth to accomplish
the most basic of tasks. Best of all, you still use the tool you know best as a
finance professional – Excel – meaning a short learning curve is all that’s needed
to get you and your team up and running on a flexible solution backed by a
powerful and secure repository.
For more information, please visit us at www.venasolutions.com. Embrace, don’t
replace, your spreadsheets.
About the Author
Gary Kantz
Director, Financial Close and Consolidations,Vena Solutions
As the Director of Financial Close and Consolidations, Gary executes Vena’s strategy around
improving monthly close, consolidation and financial reporting processes, and contributes to
marketing and educational initiatives related to Financial Close Management (FCM).
Gary has over 30 years of experience in accounting, auditing, and information technology and
is a recognized expert on consolidations and reporting and financial performance management
solutions.
Leading technology organizations have reaped the benefits of his guidance and expertise in the
form of increased efficiency and productivity, reduced costs and more timely, insightful action
plans. Gary has consulted on and implemented various enterprise solutions for organizations
around the world and is a prolific writer and speaker on the topics of enterprise performance
management and disclosure management.