Managing More with Less Doesn’t Have to Be Impossible
Our families, friends, clients, co-workers and bosses will always be asking us to do more with less and now it appears the SEC has a plan to further complicate today’s reporting demands. In these last few years surrounding the Business Process Management (BPM) environment this “request” has turned into the reality for almost every accounting, FP&A and finance department in the country.
Finance is asked to produce better analytics, more detail and a greater volume of reports with less people. In a weakening economy, Hyperion users are being asked to manage the environments that produce these results and to manage more data/applications with shrinking resources. The Hyperion Suite can help you to achieve the Impossible. The biggest challenge we have facing us is the unknown requirements for IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards)!
Over the past few years, we have heard about IFRS and SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley). These few initials have caused chaos in the workplace and placed requirements on employees as they try to figure out what the future holds. For many companies this is still a mystery and those of us who work with the Hyperion suite of products know that there are many ways to skin the same cat.
This is the time to start preparing and being proactive in taking steps towards success. Until the SEC makes a decision, US companies are jumping through hoops trying to figure out how to adopt IFRS. Without something that is published to tell companies the set of steps that they can take. Here are two things you can do to prepare:
- Pay attention to the industry websites like www.ifrs.org, www.fasb.org and www.sec.gov.
- Start thinking about how the differences between IFRS and US GAAP could result in changes to your consolidation application—i.e.,
- what will you need to change in the application to report in IFRS?
- What Sarbanes-Oxley controls do you have in place to assure the accuracy and transparency of those results?
- How will your underlying transactions systems have to change?
- How will the flow of data and use of the tools to integrate these changes need to be updated to have minimal impact on the existing reporting systems?
When you think about IFRS right now, there is really nothing but questions without a clear set of answers or explanations. But thinking about these things now and taking the appropriate action will help prepare for the effort to implement IFRS.
