Accounting advisory
Are you getting the financial information you and your investors need in a timely and cost-effective manner? Does your financial close process effectively support your decision making?
Finance leaders, including CFOs, CFOs and Treasurers, face increasing challenges in reporting to stakeholders. They are under pressure to deliver high-quality reports faster in an environment of changing technology, increased regulatory change and increased scrutiny.
Finance teams are being asked to improve reporting processes and deliver more with fewer resources. Stakeholders like board members want more information faster. To complicate matters, companies are looking for finance leaders to take on a greater role in strategic and operational decisions.
As finance teams continue to be pressured to improve efficiency, effectiveness and compliance through their ERP systems, seconds or minutes saved in processing transactions and implementing controls can yield significant benefits in high-volume transactions. These companies are working hard to figure out how to realize these benefits without investing a lot of technical implementation and support overhead.
The challenges
• The company tries to control the process, making the current process too complicated, so the same activity is performed by multiple employees and different departments; in other cases, there is no segregation between the primary users and the process control is weak
• Each department of the company has its own mandate in carrying out daily operations, sometimes overlapping with the objectives of other departments or the overall goals of the company
• Human-intensive activities, coupled with high transaction volumes and paper-based processes, create challenges and bottlenecks, and people often lose focus
• Organizational processes in the finance department are too manual, inefficient, error-prone and lack a high-quality audit trail
• Data entry in ERP is time consuming and difficult, involving multiple transaction codes and many pages
• Data entry steps are repetitive and not automated
What Bestar can do for you
Companies and their finance leaders should work harder to identify the need for clear and consistent accounting policies and guidelines; identify innovative technologies, new tools and analytics; and build skills and capabilities within teams to improve reporting performance.
Bestar can support finance teams in this ever-changing environment. Our professionals are focused on supporting leading companies in navigating this ever-changing accounting and reporting landscape, helping clients solve technical accounting and financial reporting issues.
With the insights gained from evaluating the financial statement closing process, you can move forward with more confidence in the closing process. We help you understand if, where and why mistakes or bottlenecks or extra efforts are made. We can also show you the reliability, accuracy, speed and cycle time and efficiency improvements you need for the company.
We help companies become more efficient by creating business process maps, which help identify opportunities for improvement in the companies' financial closing and reporting processes.
We specialize in analyzing and designing company workflows and business processes around their closing and financial reporting processes. Business process reengineering helps companies rethink the way they work to properly reflect operating results in their financial reports.
We advise start-ups, new and existing businesses and well-performing businesses on ad hoc accounting issues, establishing reporting structures and developing internal policy manuals and systems.
Our services are tailored to the needs of our customers to help you and solve problems, such as:
• Dealing with enterprise-wide accounting framework and policy documents
• Streamlining financial processes and controls, including developing or integrating processes as part of financial transformation and ERP implementation
• Correction of control accounts and major deficiencies
• Comparing current performance with leading practice
• Identifying improvements to reduce the number of days to close the books
• Helping point to better content for KPIs, management reports and dashboards
• Identifying opportunities to reduce the cost of the finance function
• Helping to identify volume and repetitive driven process optimization in finance functions
• Suggesting simple optimization tools, techniques or process adjustments that can be implemented and embedded in your business. This solution improves data quality, speeds up transaction processing time and reduces the risk of errors and fraud
• Leveraging our extensive relationships with key market-leading software vendors to support the selection of technologies that best suit your needs
• Advising on desired end-state processes by analyzing current deficiencies and obstacles and providing a clear and objective approach to identifying and prioritizing areas for improvement
• Documenting the parameters of each process step and flow at the workplace level, including the current situation and the desired end state process, preparing the company for the implementation of the new process model
• Developing a plan to implement the new model, defining a work plan that covers all the changes required to achieve the target process and budget
• Assistance in the development of internal accounting guidelines, policies and procedures for the company's operating environment
• Assistance in mapping accounting policies and standards, designing optimal solutions and data modeling workflows for financial, accounting and tax management tools
How Bestar assessments work
The Bestar team uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate your financial statement closing process. We conduct the following evaluations and report our findings and recommendations to you:
1. Benchmarking
Our team evaluates the performance of your company's financial statement closing process against leading practices.
2. Evaluation
Our assessment tool assesses your current performance across each key finance sub-process (i.e., processes and policies, reporting and management performance, organisation, data, people and technology).
3. Detailed review of financial statement close process activities
For each key sub-process, our team assesses the quality of existing procedures as well as the time and speed of execution; investigate risks and controls; and provide you with gap analysis, insights and recommendations. We also review your current closing process and identify issues that are slowing the process down. As a result, we provide you with findings and recommendations that help you reduce your financial reporting time and achieve a more robust and well-documented process.
4. Review dashboards, KPIs and monthly reporting packages
Our team evaluates the quality and relevance of your dashboards, KPIs and monthly reporting packages. We review objectives, processes, computations and frequency. Based on our review, we can suggest improvements to your KPIs to align with other materials, as well as your dashboard and monthly reporting package to increase their relevance and effectiveness.
5. Report findings and recommendations
This report includes all diagnosis results and also outlines findings and recommendations to help you build a more effective finance function.
Connect with us
Like to learn more? Contact us to discuss how Bestar can help work with you to improve or develop policies and processes.
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