SAP recently announced its new Fraud Management analytic applications. Currently in “controlled” (limited) release, it’s a promising start for the product and a good example of the type of business process revolution that’s possible when companies can execute complex analytics on big data sets using in-memory and other advanced processing techniques. Over the next several years a wide swath of basic corporate processes will be transformed by the shift to in-memory processing and big data technology, two key foundational elements of my office of finance research agenda. HANA has been a consistent element of SAP’s product strategy and underlies many recent new releases, such as Business Suite on HANA.
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Topics:
SAP,
Fraud,
Governance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
audit,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Business Performance Management (BPM),
compliance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Risk,
HANA
I’m wondering whether the rapid rise in earnings restatements by “accelerated filers” (companies that file their financial statements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that have a public float greater than $75 million) over the past three years is a significant trend or an interesting blip. According to a research firm, Audit Analytics, that number has grown from 153 restatements in 2009 to 245 in 2012, a 60 percent increase. What makes it a blip is that the total is still less than half the number that occurred in 2006 as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act began to take effect. As well, the number of companies restating is still less than one percent of the total. Yet it’s a blip worth paying attention to, since the consequences of a restatement pose a serious professional challenge to finance executives. The right software can help address some of the underlying causes that lead to the need to restate earnings.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Governance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
audit,
close,
Consolidation,
Controller,
Tax,
XBRL,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
compliance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
FPM,
SEC
Taxes – both indirect (sales or value added taxes, for example) and direct (income taxes) – are one the largest expense items on the corporate income statement. In recent years it has become common for large and even midsize companies to automate their indirect tax management process, but direct tax management has remained a bastion of manual processes built on a heap of desktop spreadsheets. In previous blog posts I discussed this issue and the role of the tax data warehouse as a necessary foundation for automating the direct tax process. Addressing an important need, Vertex is currently providing a limited release of its Enterprise offering, a single-platform approach to managing all types of taxes (direct and indirect) across the entire tax life cycle (from analysis through provisioning to audit defense) using a single data source.
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Topics:
ERP,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
audit,
finance transformation,
Tax,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Management (IM),
Vertex,
FPM
Many people enjoy mystery stories or crime thrillers; in the same vein of savoring the whodunnit and howdunnit, I like a good accounting scandal. My fascination with cooking the books started when I was young with the “great salad oil swindle”, which wound up causing losses in excess of $1 billion in today’s money and even threatened a Wall Street collapse. This disaster was averted by the assassination of President Kennedy, which kept markets closed on Monday, November 25, 1963, and gave the parties involved an extra day to resolve the matter. Nowadays I look forward to receiving FIRST, a compendium prepared by IBM’s Risk Analytics group of the previous month’s financial shenanigans. So, the recent Hewlett-Packard-Autonomy imbroglio fascinates me.
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Topics:
Fraud,
Governance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
audit,
IFRS,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Hewlett Packard,
Meg Whitman,
SEC
People used to use the phrase “the last mile” solely to refer to a condemned prisoner’s path to execution. Then the telecommunications industry picked it up to describe that part of a circuit between a major trunk line and a subscriber. Later still a defunct software company, Movaris (now part of Trintech), used the phrase in an analogy to refer to the set of activities that take place between when a company closes its books and the point where it finishes its external reporting activities, such as disclosing periodic earnings and financial conditions to investors or filing financial statements with regulators or lenders. It was an attempt to focus attention on the need to automate and better coordinate the multiple, disparate but interconnected threads that have to be orchestrated to complete the external reporting tasks accurately and on time. Personally, I’ve never cared for the phrase being used in this context; there are really multiple “last miles,” with multiple and sometimes overlapping destinations. I prefer “the close–to-report cycle” because it’s more precise in its description, and because rather than pointing to finality, “cycle” defines it for what it is – a repetitive periodic activity. And because it is periodic and repetitive, it benefits from process optimization and automation, which can substantially reduce the effort required to complete a cycle and alleviate the stress certain departments often feel as deadlines loom.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Governance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
audit,
close,
Consolidation,
Controller,
XBRL,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
compliance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
FPM,
SEC
I recently spoke with Oversight Systems, an operational intelligence analytics company that uses predictive analytics and optimization to help companies save money, reduce the risk of loss and fraud, and reinforce corporate governance and compliance efforts. Ventana Research views operational intelligence as an emerging technology with the potential for a high return on investment. By continuously monitoring activities in a company’s IT systems, Oversight’s Web-based software continuously, consistently and objectively monitors all business processes to identifies opportunities to save money, cut fraud, minimize risk and provide real-time controls to support governance.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Predictive Analytics,
Fraud,
Governance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
audit,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Cloud Computing,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Operational Intelligence,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Management (IM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
controls,
Oversight Systems
I have commented before on the movement to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by the United States to replace US-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). Most recently I discussed the drive to harmonize the significant differences between US-GAAP and IFRS on revenue recognition and lease accounting. To those who are interested in but not intimately involved with the subject, I suspect the current situation is a bit confusing, since there are multiple groups involved in the discussions on how best to proceed, each with its own agenda. The full adoption issue remains in flux, but let me weigh in the matter.
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Topics:
Reporting,
audit,
Consolidation,
IFRS,
US-GAAP accounting,
XBRL,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Financial Management,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
financial standards,
FPM
