Creating a Continuous Performance Management Cycle with Financial Signaling

Empowering Finance teams to unleash their true value and elevate beyond their traditional roles is a basic tenet of OneStream’s mission of delivering 100% customer success. How? At the core, OneStream is designed to empower the organization with the insights required to support effective decision-making, drive performance and lead at speed. In fact, with today’s environment of volatility and market disruption, line-of-business and Finance leaders must have access to accurate, timely and accessible information to survive and thrive amid the unprecedented uncertainty.

Conquering Complexity to Lead at Speed

Leading at speed during this time of rapid and complex economic change has become more critical than ever. Why? To survive, let alone thrive, organizations must react with both agility and confidence.

Yet unfortunately, many Finance teams struggle with silos of data, fragmented point solutions and cumbersome spreadsheets to manage their month-end close and reporting cycles. This environment limits access to data and insights and results in a lack of agility needed to quickly react at the speed of the business. In fact, according to the FSN Future of Finance Analytics 2020 Survey, only 14% of respondents answered that the analytic efforts exerted by their organizations are considered insightful. Additionally, with a reliance on the month-end close cycle, insights that are provided are not timely enough for organizations to react to changing conditions as they occur.

To truly lead at speed, Finance leaders and their teams must gain access to “right time” insights and break their reliance on the month-end reporting cycle. They must also be able to decipher the hidden signals within large volumes of daily and weekly operational data to recognize opportunities to take action and impact outcomes before the month-end close.

Move Ahead of Month-End Reporting with Financial Signaling

Financial Signaling is the term OneStream uses to describe the distilling and analyzing of detailed operational data to identify key trends and signals. But this can’t be accomplished by simply loading and analyzing volumes of transactional data. The key to Financial Signaling is integrating large volumes of transactional data and putting it in context by blending it with summarized financial data, and the financial intelligence that’s core for their monthly financial processes – such as accounts, hierarchies, currency and other dimensionality. Powered through OneStream’s Intelligent Finance platform, Financial Signaling empowers users with seamless access to high-frequency daily and weekly operational and financial insights to help operational leaders take mid-stream action that can impact results before month-end.

These insights include information on suppliers, customer orders and shipments, and core financial data around working capital metrics (see Figure 1). But really, Financial Signaling could apply to anything that’s critical to the organization’s Corporate Finance, Ops Finance, Brand Finance and Sales Finance teams.

Most importantly, based on these signals, Finance teams can work with their business partners to propose actions ahead of month-end to continually drive performance.

Figure 1: Financial Signaling

Unleash the Power of Intelligent Financial & Operational Signaling

OneStream enables Finance teams to maintain trust in the governed financial book-of-record and simply blend in the daily and weekly operational data required for rapid-fire decision-making. Here are a few of OneStream’s key capabilities that support Financial Signaling:

• Analytic Blend – Directly integrate large volumes of transactional data with summarized financial results and maintain one source of the truth for all data within the office of Finance with OneStream’s Analytic Blend. Combine governed financial data and analytics with millions of lines of transactional data from ERP, CRM, HCM and DW systems to intelligently enhance and extend the analysis.
• Built-In Financial Intelligence – Enable alignment of book-of-record financial data and the dimensional structures understood by business users to create operationally relevant signals and insights on daily and weekly operational KPIs with OneStream’s built-in financial intelligence on accounts, currency, ownership, intercompany eliminations and hierarchies.
• Self Service Visualizations & Pivot Grids – Empower analysis by executives, line-of-business managers and analysts through interactive dashboards and other data visualization and analysis tools. Quickly analyze and report on financial and operational data from across the organization. Combine governed financial data, millions of lines of transaction data, financial and operational KPIs, or all the above – in a single application. Slice and dice large volumes of data, and apply filters and conditional formatting to highlight key business trends. Drill into underlying details, including GL and sub-ledger transactions.

Financial Signaling in Action

In a recent customer success webinar, BDO – a global provider of assurance, tax and advisory services – shared how they conquered complexity by replacing multiple Oracle Hyperion applications with OneStream for financial consolidation, reporting, planning and forecasting. A key factor in their decision was OneStream’s information delivery capabilities that empower key decision-makers with Financial Signaling through rich, self-service dashboards and interactive reports. These features allow BDO to easily spot key trends, metrics and signals.

Conclusion

Like with BDO, OneStream empowers hundreds of organizations to unleash the value of their Finance teams. And with Financial Signaling, Finance teams are finding new and innovative solutions to conquer the complexities of the current business and economic environment to lead at speed and drive continuous performance improvements.

Learn More

To learn more, download our Leading at Speed with Financial Signaling solution brief.