Check out the testimonial Allyne Ramiro (Head of Finance and Business Technology) on the implementation and gains made as fast closing at HarperCollins Brazil
A Complex and Expensive Routine
The Monthly and/or Annual Closing is a critical and slow process for all companies. Consuming an extensive workload of its human resources, which should be focused on their core activity.
Problems that appear during the month are not always resolved promptly and accumulate to be resolved during the few days reserved for closing.
Solving the problems becomes even more difficult, because the errors that are reported lack clarity. Sometimes they are displayed in the Work Center, other times they are only described in the report generated by the process. In this way, there is no common repository of errors, causing the user to access several resources to search for possible errors within the executed processes.
Users assigned to the task of monthly and/or annual closing forget important processes such as validating the system's integrity reports, and the urgency to deliver results leads to decisions that are not always the right ones to prioritize. solutions more immediate, which can translate into rework later or financial losses.
In addition to the known difficulties, there is no easy monitoring of this process, which prevents managers from having an overview of which processes have already been executed, which errors have been identified and how much is left for the closing process to end.
In the case of annual closing, as it is carried out very infrequently, the user forgets additional steps that need to be carried out in this case. For example, the annual closing to update the opening balance for the next fiscal year. To meet the recognized demand of several clients, the MPL brings you MPL Fast Closing, an automation and management tool designed to streamline the Monthly Closing Process.
Your Benefits Include
- Early resolution of problems throughout the month, avoiding accumulation of errors to be resolved during the monthly/annual closing period.
- Execution of the closing processes logically, following the necessary sequence, without user interference, involving routines of validation of day-to-day operations, execution of the accounting process and integrity reports, until all problems are resolved.
- User notification in exceptional situations, as known errors can be resolved automatically.
- Better organization and visualization of the closing process, through a dashboard where the user can follow the closing, follow the errors reported and decide which of the suggested actions will be put into practice.
- Finally, the automation of the closing process aims to minimize the time and resources spent during the monthly and/or annual closing process, freeing up resources for activities that add more value to your company's core business.
Features Available to Customers
- Process configuration, where the execution script of the closing routines and other information necessary for closing is registered, allowing this work to be guided by the product through the automatic execution of its routines.
- During the month, from the development of validation reports, notifications about potential problems will be sent for proactive actions.
- The notifications sent have an escalation of responsibility, if the errors found are not resolved within the given time.
- Graphic monitoring of the closing process, with an improved UI for managing messages and/or problems identified using watchlists, dashboards and graphs.
- For the identified problems, use of automations and process simplifications to reduce the error resolution time.
- At the end of the closing process, generation of existing management reports, with an improved layout through the use of BI Publisher.
Technically, MPL Fast Closing uses the most current functionality provided by Oracle – Orchestrations, Notifications, Composite Pages and EnterpriseOne Pages:
And it allows us to organize the errors to induce the actions to be taken:
alerts
Users will be notified when an error occurs so that proactive action can be taken.
Actions
Errors are grouped by type to organize the actions to be taken (1). Suggested actions are displayed to guide error correction (2).
Implementing Fast Closing
When we talk about an implementation project, we are talking about something quick, which only requires the installation of the product in your company and training for end users.