Read Time: 3 minutes
A Tepid Economy Drives the Need for a Strong Financial Consolidation Process
According to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, the US economy is continuing to show signs of improvement. Yet the global economy “is clouded by ‘weak growth, no new jobs, no high inflation, still high debt – all those things that should be low and that are high,’” says IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde. And if we learned anything from the fallout of the Great Recession, it’s that our economy is simply one part of a vast web of interconnected economies.
Perhaps the most concise way to describe the present economic environment is to say that it is tepid. Such a view seems to be a significant driving force behind the results of the 2016 Finance Priorities Survey conducted by Financial Executives Research Foundation and consulting firm Protiviti. The survey indicated that the #1 priority of corporate financial leaders would be to maintain margins and earnings performance. But also high on the list of priorities was a continuing search for greater “precision and efficiency in their cash forecasting, period-end close, and related reconciliation and consolidation activities.”
The holy grail of any financial consolidation process is to pull together all the data from all departments and each separate legal entity and arrive at a “single version of the truth” in real-time. In today’s economic environment there is no other way to monitor a company’s margins, especially if your company has more operational complexity than a proprietorship that sells only one product or service.
Efficient Financial Consolidation Processes Protect Margins and Earnings
Working to achieve the necessary level of precision without high-powered consolidation software like Kepion Reporting, would quickly drive the efficiency of the finance department into the ground. Depending on the size of the organization, even routine period-close consolidation becomes a sliding scale of complexity. In a tepid economic environment, where opportunities or threats may arise with little warning and from unexpected places, developing greater efficiency and precision in the creation of a single, real-time version of the financial truth is critical. It may be the difference between maintaining margins and seeing earning performance plummet.
Financial professionals can utilize any number of financial consolidation software packages. Kepion’s cloud-based platform has the benefit of being built around the way your company operates. It provides the key information needed, at the level of aggregation required, to make sound financial decisions from anywhere within your organization. Our is the most effective way to maintain margins and earnings performance available to the financial professional today.
Interested in learning more about Kepion’s financial consolidation abilities? Book a demo to see what Kepion can do for your organization.