The traditional office of finance has five main organs: accounting keeps the books; financial planning and analysis (FP&A) analyzes performance and manages the forward-looking activities of the company such as planning, budgeting and forecasting; corporate finance raises outside money; treasury takes care of the cash and bank accounts, and tax. The modern office of finance requires a sixth: Finance IT (FIT).
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Analytics,
Financial Performance Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
Digital Technology,
Operations & Supply Chain,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
blockchain,
robotic finance,
Predictive Planning,
Conversational Computing,
revenue and lease accounting,
collaborative computing,
Subscription Management,
AI & Machine Learning
By itself, data isn’t useful for business; the application of analytics is necessary to transform data into actionable information. Data analysis of one sort or another has long been a core competence of finance departments, applied to balance sheets, income statements or cash flow statements. Today, however, Finance must go beyond these basics by expanding the scope of the data being examined to include all financial and operational information that can yield actionable insights. Analysis thus...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Human Capital Management,
Marketing,
Voice of the Customer,
business intelligence,
embedded analytics,
Learning Management,
Analytics,
Collaboration,
Data Governance,
Data Lake,
Data Preparation,
Information Management,
Internet of Things,
Contact Center,
Data,
Product Information Management,
Sales Performance Management,
Workforce Management,
Financial Performance Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
Digital Technology,
Digital Marketing,
Digital Commerce,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
blockchain,
natural language processing,
robotic finance,
Predictive Planning,
candidate engagement,
Intelligent CX,
Conversational Computing,
Continuous Payroll,
revenue and lease accounting,
collaborative computing,
mobile computing,
Subscription Management,
agent management,
extended reality,
AI & Machine Learning
PROS Holdings is a software vendor with two distinct but related sets of products. The company began in 1985 offering revenue management software to airlines, hospitality and rental car companies. More recently it added price and revenue management software focusing on B2B services, chemicals and energy, consumer goods manufacturers, food and beverage, healthcare, insurance and technology. This note focuses on the B2B portion of the business.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Sales,
Customer Experience,
Marketing,
Office of Finance,
Analytics,
Data Preparation,
Sales Performance Management,
Financial Performance Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
Digital Marketing,
Digital Commerce,
Pricing and Promotion Management,
Sales Enablement and Execution
Was accounting ever cool? Well, yes, in a nerdy sort of way. Double-entry bookkeeping, codified in the 15th century by Fra Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar and pal of Leonardo Da Vinci, was essential for the expansion of trade and the creation of the modern corporation. Bookkeeping and accounting were as important to economic development as two other financial inventions – insurance and fractional reserve banking. Double-entry bookkeeping is an elegant system, simple yet powerful. It supports...
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Topics:
Big Data,
Office of Finance,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Financial Performance Management,
Enterprise Resource Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting
Blockchains are attractive because their built-in security and trust factors make them useful for almost all business interactions involving organizations and individuals. Blockchains have two basic functions. One is as a method for handling transactions involving property such as land deeds, trademarks or other assets. The second involves exchanges of data such as identities of individuals or businesses, the location of an object at a point in time or weather conditions. All interactions...
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Topics:
Big Data,
Data Science,
Mobile,
Marketing Performance Management,
Office of Finance,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Cloud Computing,
Data Governance,
Data Integration,
Data Preparation,
Internet of Things,
Digital Technology,
Digital Marketing,
Digital Commerce,
Operations & Supply Chain
OneStream XF from OneStream Software is a financial performance management (FPM) platform available on-premises or in the cloud. The company is a relative newcomer (it started in 2010) but its founders are industry veterans and it has a long list of referenceable customers. Being self-financed, it only recently began to raise its market profile. Its SmartCPM system consists of software for statutory financial consolidation, planning, forecasting, budgeting and reporting that’s used primarily by...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
HRMS,
Financial Performance Management,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
Sales Planning and Analytics
The use of blockchain distributed ledgers in business processes is now a common theme in many business software vendors’ presentations. The technology has a multitude of potential uses. However, presentations about the opportunities for digital transformation always leave me wondering: How is this magic going to happen? I wonder this because the details about how data flows from point A to point B via a blockchain are critically important to blockchain utility and therefore the pace of its...
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Topics:
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Forecast,
FP&A,
Machine Learning,
Reporting,
budget,
Budgeting,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
Data Management,
Cognitive Computing,
Integrated Business Planning,
AI,
forecasting,
consolidating
Ventana Research uses the term “predictive finance” to describe a forward-looking, action-oriented finance organization that places emphasis on advising its company rather than fulfilling the traditional roles of a transactions processor and reporter. Technology is driving the shift away from the traditional bean-counting role. The cumulative evolution of software advances will substantially reduce finance and accounting workloads by automating most of the mechanical, rote functions in...
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Topics:
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Forecast,
FP&A,
Machine Learning,
Reporting,
budget,
Budgeting,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
Data Management,
Cognitive Computing,
Integrated Business Planning,
AI,
forecasting,
consolidating
Prophix is an established provider of financial performance management (FPM) software for planning and budgeting, forecasting, analysis and reporting, and managing the financial close and consolidation process. Its eponymous software is designed specifically for midsize companies or midsize divisions of larger corporations. These organizations are a distinctive segment of the market in that they have almost all the functional requirements of large enterprises but have fewer resources to apply...
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Topics:
Planning,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
Consolidation,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Collaboration,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning,
accounting close,
Price and Revenue Management,
Work and Resource Management,
Sales Planning and Analytics,
Midsize
From my perspective, supply chain management (SCM) and sales and operations planning (S&OP) are two of the most underappreciated disciplines of modern corporate management. Properly applied, they can improve performance and competitiveness by increasing customer satisfaction and reducing costs. A combination of more capable information technology with advances in operations research and analytics has made managing supply and demand chains potentially more impactful by making them more flexible...
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Topics:
ERP,
Kinaxis,
Supply Chain Planning,
Analytics,
SCM,
S&OP,
Sales and Operations Planning,
supply chain management,
procurement