The 6 key services for a future-enabled digital finance transformation

Finance teams want a tool that delivers all the benefits of digital finance transformation: operational excellence for faster account closing, data reliability for account accuracy, and business agility to meet changing regulatory standards. The best tool for the job will include these 6 key service capabilities.  

1. Data transformation service

Besides transforming operational data (business events) based on business needs, this service allows fast integration of any business applications system with any financial system: multi-GAAP ledgers and IFRS books. It executes multiple accounting rules to control, validate, and enrich data from business apps and translate it into general ledger postings. And it synchronizes the data feed while mediating upstream and downstream systems and ensuring end-to-end data flow governance.

2. Data quality service

Used for exception handling and manual entries, this service proactively alerts detection of translation errors. It automatically pinpoints the error location and allows authorized users to manually update data in the system, mitigating any impact on the closing timeline. Profile-based permissions provide highly secure and auditable controls over all data. Data quality service also enriches and controls events before interpretation by leveraging master data and rules from enterprise data repositories.

3. Data exposure service

This service is about accessing data – and its lineage – to generate audit and business insights. It provides a tool for business users to access granular data and justify the transformation done by the system. The data exposure service is used widely for event data and account entry storage, audit trail navigation for facilitating research, data reconciliation and analysis, and gaining insightful intelligence that can be published in various reporting formats.

4. Specifications and modelizations service

A common language is needed for finance teams to design and manage the lifecycle of accounting schemes up to the point of integration. This service enables them to map, document, centralize, automate, and secure accounting systems and interfaces, giving stakeholders improved data readability and designations for control and audit purposes. Teams can collaborate around a central repository of data, documents, and processes while upholding compliance with all regulatory standards.

5. Configuration and operations management service

The configurations and operations management service gives users autonomy from IT by using self-service capabilities and leveraging DevOps techniques. It empowers accounting specialists to configure rules, perform administrative operations, control user accessibility, and define role-based privileges using a common editor interface. This service also equips finance teams with monitoring dashboards that give them improved visibility into all financial and accounting data being generated. 

6. Data exchange service

Digital finance processes don’t run in a vacuum. They must integrate with data exchange technologies used by businesses today and in the future. For seamless operations, these data exchange capabilities need to be part of the entire digital financial accounting solution and include managed file transfer (MFT) for batch file exchange, B2B/EDI for reliable message exchange, and real-time data exchange using APIs and pre-built API connectors. One solution, one supplier is the best policy.