The close describes a corporation's ability to complete its accounting cycles and close its books quickly and with the highest degree of quality. Achieving a fast and accurate close while maintaining control of your financial processes is increasingly becoming a key ingredient in the enterprise performance management (EPM) goals of some of the world's most successful companies.
The Close combines the market's most powerful reporting and consolidation engine in our financial consolidation solution, and our unique governance, risk and compliance capabilities with our market-leading domain expertise and best practice methodologies.
This new solution helps organizations to:
- Break down the barriers that preclude a fast, quality close
- Automate the close process, replacing the time-consuming manual processes that impede central finance offices
- Enable flexibility while still maintaining the control and integrity of key financial processes
- Manage the complexity so that the headache of coping with multiple currency, multi-GAAP ownership structures is eliminated
- Manage an end-to-end reporting process, from source to disclosure with complete trust and auditability
The Close supports an end-to-end close process from source to digital disclosure (click image to enlarge)
Integration
End users in finance and throughout the organization can address key enterprise performance management processes like the close while benefiting from a complete range of best-in-class EPM applications, all integrated into our suite. All our EPM solutions include our industry-leading enterprise information management and business intelligence capabilities, which are brought together on an Integrated Data Model (IDM).
Solution Benefits:
A fast, high-quality close process, supported by The Close, enables:
- Quick access to valuable financial information and more time for value-added analysis, allowing management to more rapidly identify problem areas such as underperforming products or business units, and make faster decisions to improve those areas of performance.
- Greater accuracy, quality and integrity of financial statements, as key financial processes are aligned with internal control and compliance policies into a single view of financial performance.
- Cost savings in the entire close process generated from the time saved on manual intervention, error reconciliation, variance analysis and data processing/collection.
- Better investor relations resulting from a company's ability to publish detailed statutory results and financial data ahead of regulatory deadlines and before industry peers.
- Improved work-life balance for key accounting staff resulting from improved control systems and reporting processes that are supported by automation, workflow management and data entry validation.
Beyond Products: Everything you need to be successful
Based on our domain expertise and experience with the world's leading companies, The Close goes beyond software to provide you with the consulting methodologies, intellectual property and training you and your team need to realize all of the benefits of your solution purchase.
Free White Paper
Improving Intercompany Reconciliation for a Faster Close
- PDF 350KB 
This paper examines the issues behind intercompany reconciliation and outlines how companies are able to make significant progress by removing intercompany reconciliation from the close critical path.
Case Study
"With Business Objects' financial consolidation solution, we’ve been able to move from a limited biannual financial close of 33 days to a 10-day monthly full close process. The outcome is a significant improvement in the quality of data, which in turn has increased our confidence and understanding of Nissan’s performance."
Alain Pierre Raynaud, Global Controller of Group Finance and member of the Nissan Group Executive Committee
