Financial Close Manager

Problem Statement

Manual tracking of the close process, using excel and e-mails is one of the reasons companies still experience issues in their close process from an accuracy, transparency, complexity and comprehensiveness perspective.

By standardizing and embedding controls in period-end close processes, organizations can eliminate labor-intensive, non-value adding activities and streamline decentralized and disjointed workflows that lengthen cycle times, increase the risk of control failure, and threaten the integrity of financial statements.

However, you don’t need to spend countless hours on how to close the books in Real time! 

This article will guide you through how Financial Close Manager is a pathway to Streamline and Accelerate Your Close Operations and best practices you need for a successful journey to EPM Closing and Reporting.

What is Financial Close Cycle

Financial Close Cycle indicates the number of business days required to close the books of accounts and submit finalized financial reports to the management and regulatory authorities at the end of the accounting period. It can be monthly/quarterly/yearly from the time that financial data gathering begins, until management and any regulatory authorities receive finalized financial reports.

Close challenges 

• Inconsistent closing calendar and checklist 

• Lack of quality data from upstream processes or ineffective data aggregation activities

• Lack of automated close processes (e.g., high level of manual journal entries) 

• Ineffective procedures for validating results 

• Lack of timely hard close of periods and ability to post transactions after reporting package submission

• Intercompany accounting – manual adjustments

Organizations are finding it difficult to track:

• The current status of close

• Number of open tasks?

• Where is it stuck?

• Is there any issue in closing the task? 

• Who all are assigned to close tasks?

• Is the predecessor/successor tasks followed?

• Is any assigned employee on Leave?

• Do they need some backup for assigned employee?

• There is no workflow to monitor?

• Approval mechanism in place?

• Looking for email notification for current status?

• Availability of backups?

Close Manager

Oracle Financial Close Manager module of FCCS is built for centralized, web-based management of period-end close activities across the extended financial close cycle.

It helps to manage all financial close cycle tasks, including ledger and sub ledger close, data loading and mapping, financial consolidation, account reconciliation, tax/treasury and internal and external reporting processes.

This includes:

• Close Manager Components (Setup Calendar, Security, Periods, Years, Custom Attributes, Alert Types, Integrations)

• Define Tasks for a Close Process - setup Task Types

• Define Dashboard Views (Calendar, Task List, Gantt Chart)

• Create / Update Templates (and validate) with repeatable close tasks

• Setup / Update Schedule by pulling from a template

• Workflow process

Thank you!

Created by Mohit Jain & Megha Gupta