As companies grapple with accelerating changes across most global markets, they face critical challenges for staying ahead of competitors, sustaining growth, maximizing profitability, complying with regulatory requirements and establishing organizational agility to respond quickly to the unexpected.

In the face of these important forces, the Office of the CFO is evolving beyond a traditional focus on accounting, controlling and reporting and is now taking on a much broader scope within most organizations. 

In addition to the traditional short-term, quarter-to-quarter pressures of closing and reporting financial information, CFOs are increasingly responsible for strategically important existential issues and business innovation programs.

Some of the Key forces driving change for CFOs:

• Compliance with regulatory mandates
• Unification of data sources and legacy data
• Asset management, utilization and financing
• Machine Learning
• Cybersecurity and privacy issues
• Movement to Cloud Solutions

Let’s take a brief look at each of these forces.

Compliance Requirements – New Mandates and Reassessment of Existing Regulations

Recent and impending regulatory changes to Revenue Recognition (ASC 606 and IFRS 15), Lease Accounting (ASC 842 and IFRS), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and others are forcing companies to undertake significant changes to their accounting and reporting processes.  In addition, each of these major changes to accounting processes also will generate reassessment of Internal Control over Financial Reporting (ICFR) procedures and Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance.

Beyond the accounting issues, these waves of regulatory change are also having major impact on overall business performance and investor relations, such as the income statement impacts of RevRec and the balance sheet impacts of Lease Accounting changes.  CFOs need to help guide their companies through these issues to assure compliance while mitigating or avoiding any negative business impacts.

Unification of Data within a Single-source-of-Truth

One of the most important challenges that companies must overcome to effectively compete in today’s fast-moving environment is the ability to make better and faster decisions.  In this effort, data is our friend, but it doesn’t always seem like it.  For most companies, the explosion of big data is happening across a diverse landscape of disconnected legacy data structures that are not conducive to fast or easy decision-making.  All too often, participants in the decision-making process are operating on separate sources of information that must be reconciled before they can even understand the issues that they’re trying to address.

Here again, CFOs are at the center of the financial transformation process that is vital for solving these “disagreeable data” issues.  By proactively moving to advanced platforms such as SAP’s S/4HANA that can bring together all data and transactional operations within a unified and highly scalable environment, CFOs can provide a “single-source-of-truth” to streamline the decision process and use data to bring people together rather than keeping them apart.

Asset Management, Utilization and Financing

Accounting organizations have always been responsible for the numbers related to corporate assets but in too many cases the actual acquisition and management processes for many leased and purchased assets take place in widely dispersed and often autonomous organizational units.  This has made it difficult to get a clear picture of asset deployment and utilization processes throughout the company.

In this case, one of the big regulatory changes around lease accounting (ASC 842 and IFRS 16) can have a positive and transformative effect on overall asset management processes.  Compliance with these changes requires companies to get a better handle on their assets inventory and conduct appropriate assessments for financial reporting.  A major side benefit of implementing ASC 842 & IFRS 16 will be the unification of information on assets within a single end-to-end process that not only meets the accounting mandates but gives decision-makers and line managers at all levels a shared view and standardized criteria for asset acquisition, financing, utilization and lifecycle management.

Machine Learning

This is an exciting arena that is destined to impact companies across a wide range of functions, including within the accounting group and beyond.  Machine learning uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to “learn” and to automatically improve performance based on data.

Within the CFO’s domain, machine learning can significantly improve productivity and processing speed in transactional areas such as procurement, order-to-payment, cash management, etc.  By leveraging a unified data-and-transactional environment such as S/4HANA along with integrated analytics, new initiatives in machine learning can automate many of these repetitive processes and free up staff to more effectively manage the bigger picture.  In addition, machine learning is destined to transform many front-line processes in operations and even sales – so CFOs can act as a vanguard and guide for helping optimize these machine learning initiatives throughout the organization.

Cybersecurity and Privacy Issues

Everyone knows that cybersecurity is a major risk area that all companies need to continuously address. In addition, heightened focus on privacy issues such as GDPR in Europe along with similar initiatives in the US and around the world are spurring companies to improve controls over their collection and usage of other people’s data. 

Because of these external driving forces from the compliance side, in many companies the primary responsibility for privacy and security is shifting more toward the CFO rather than being handled solely within the IT department. While the implementation responsibilities and duty to safeguard information will continue to be shared across many functional areas, the overall mandates for cybersecurity and privacy compliance are most often landing in the laps of CFOs.

Movement to Cloud Solutions

This last area of change for CFOs is perhaps the most wide-ranging and is interrelated with all the issues discussed above.  Moving applications to the cloud enables companies to gain many benefits, such as lower infrastructure and capital expenditure costs, improved scalability, increased collaboration between users, consistent user interfaces, shared data structures, and easier upgrades.

Most companies have been moving toward the cloud already but in many cases it has been a piecemeal process of using targeted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications for specific functions, such as CRM, marketing automation, sales support, etc.  Many enterprises are already running parts of SAP in the cloud as well with solutions such as SuccessFactors for human resources and Ariba for procurement.

What is needed going forward is a more comprehensive approach to cloud migration that addresses the strategic issues relating to cloud solutions.  Here again, CFOs need to take the lead on defining the overall goals and laying out the roadmaps for implementation. 

With S/4HANA’s unifying approach and options for either on-premise or cloud deployments, CFOs have an excellent opportunity to chart a course for their companies that includes both near-term incremental opportunities and an overall vision for cloud across the organization.

The bottom line for CFOs is the need to step up and lead their organizations in all the six areas discussed above and to provide the enterprise-wide perspective to pull all these transformational pieces together. 

At Bramasol, we only have one question for you: “How can we help you get there?”

Over recent years, companies throughout the world are experiencing a series of major changes in regulatory and compliance mandates that are disrupting existing accounting and business processes. 

Implementing new revenue recognition standards (ASC 606 and IFRS 15) has been the key emphasis during the run up to the January 2018 deadline.  Now, lease accounting (ASC 842 and IFRS 16) has taken the main spotlight with less than four months until the January 2019 compliance deadline.

There’s nothing like some hard deadlines to help focus our minds and energy, however for the sake of your company’s future, it’s important to not see these dates as short-term finish lines.  Instead, these deadlines on the calendar are actually just milestones in the longer run toward a culture of sustainable compliance that is woven into the core fabric of your . Taking the long view also enables companies to institute a Comply, Optimize and Transform strategic approach that leverages analytics and data integration to turn compliance into a competitive advantage.

In short, compliance is not a sprint.  It is a marathon and you need to view it as such.

You can’t just treat compliance as a short all-out sprint in your street clothes, after which everything goes back to normal.  This approach will just leave you and your organization exhausted and still well short of achieving important long-term compliance integration goals.

For example, it is way too soon to breathe a sigh of relief and declare victory over revenue recognition. Although new standards were effective on January 1, 2018 for most public companies with calendar year-end closing, the mandated disclosure and reporting requirements are continuing to drive ongoing ripples of change throughout most organizations.

Those long-run minded companies that invested in purpose-built, comprehensive RevRec solutions, such as SAP Revenue Accounting and Reporting (RAR), have proactively laid the foundation for continuous compliance that enables tight integration with advanced analytics and core finance processes.

On the other hand, sprint-minded companies that focused instead on minimizing disruptions by using “solutions” such as offline spreadsheets or other non-integrated RevRec software are now facing even harder choices ahead.  This means that every quarterly or annual reporting cycle going forward will perpetuate the inherent hassles of their short-term thinking.  Instead of smoothly extracting the needed RevRec information directly from finance operations and keep a steady pace over the long run, CFOs and their staff in these companies find themselves running that same sprint over and over again.

Even some choices that seem safe in the short run can turn out to be dead ends. Take for example, companies running SAP ECC environments that opted to use SD RevRec in ECC as their quick road to revenue recognition compliance.  Now, as they look ahead to the future of SAP with S/4 HANA, these companies have discovered that SD RevRec will no longer be supported. Oops, dead end!

If you’re facing this specific challenge of how to get from SD RevRec to RAR supported in S/4 HANA, you should check out Bramasol’s upcoming webinar on September 20, 2018 titled “SD RevRec is Dead. What Now?”  Listen as our RevRec Center of Excellence experts talk about the right sequence – RAR first or S/4 first, or is it simultaneous. What are my data considerations and how can I ensure a smooth transition?

Viewed from the big picture, trying to run an endless series of sprints puts a lot more wear and tear on your organization when compared to setting out with a marathon strategy from the start and charting out a pace that considers all of the hills, obstacles, curves and straightaways that must be traversed to achieve your end goals.

But take heart; even if you started out with a sprinting mindset, with a good understanding of long-term compliance strategies and effective coaching from a knowledgeable partner that knows the terrain ahead, you can effectively shift to a well-planned long-term strategy built to keep on winning over the long run.

We can all agree that any physical building needs to have a strong foundation to assure safety of the occupants and sufficient resilience to maintain structural integrity against external forces, such as wind, flood, earthquakes and other potentially damaging events.

For CFOs facing the challenges of dynamically changing regulatory requirements, establishing a strong Compliance Foundation is also vital for avoiding the risks of non-compliance, such as legal sanctions, while also ensuring adaptability for accommodating ongoing changes driven by both internal and external forces.

Some companies view new accounting standards as specific painful topics that need to be handled with ad hoc, standalone solutions.  The thinking behind this approach is to “limit the impacts” and minimize changes to other related financial and operational processes.

However, this line of thinking is inherently shortsighted.

Over years of helping many companies on their journeys to compliance with new standards such as ASC 606, IFRS 15, ASC 842, IFRS 16 and others, Bramasol’s experts have found that embracing the changes and making them an integral part of core financial operations is a much more effective and efficient approach. 

Rather than trying to limit the impacts of changing compliance regulations, forward-thinking companies proactively incorporate them as key elements in the central foundation for all related processes.

At Bramasol, we firmly believe that Compliance Innovation Empowers Overall Finance Innovation.

Every new compliance program and solution should be treated as an additional important building block to be tightly integrated into the underlying core foundation, and bound together using connective “mortar” such as comprehensive analytics, shared in-memory data sets, agile reporting, configurable dashboards, and built-in disclosure processes.

When deploying compliance solutions that should integrate seamlessly within comprehensive business processes, we always start by looking for solutions that are designed to work with core ERP and Finance systems.  For example, SAP Revenue Accounting and Reporting (RAR) is integrated with SAP FICO and has the flexibility to act as an agnostic engine for revenue recognition with other ERP environments. On the lease accounting front, SAP Contract and Lease Management provides a compliance solution that integrates across existing SAP platforms and directly accesses core data sets.  Looking forward, both of these solutions are designed to integrate with S/4HANA (on-premise or cloud) and Bramasol is proactively providing analytics and disclosure solutions to leverage these integration opportunities.

To help with rapid deployment while still maintaining tight integration, we’ve created purpose-built compliance and disclosure solutions, including our Rapid Leasing Compliance Solution and Rapid RevRecReady Compliance Solution.  Both solutions expedite the implementation process by leveraging pre-built capabilities while providing robust compliance coverage for the relevant regulations.

In keeping with the overall philosophy of building a solid and comprehensive Compliance Foundation, all our purpose-built solutions make use of core SAP Cloud Analytics and data sources, which minimizes duplication, enhances productivity and eliminates isolated pockets of data.

As illustrated below, by building all your compliance activities on a solid foundation of SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Analytics and agile dashboard technologies, each pillar of compliance and finance innovation can be directly integrated with core processes and data.  This makes the entire structure more efficient and improves the coherence between various compliance efforts and ongoing operational activities.

If you’d like to learn more about this approach to building a comprehensive Compliance Foundation, visit here to request a consultation.

If you think of today’s businesses as being like complex organisms, then it becomes easier to understand the critical role of advanced analytics in monitoring organizational health and supporting growth. Just as your body’s nervous system, immune responses and circulatory network provide continuous sensory feedback to identify problems and maintain healthy functioning, your company’s analytics processes are critical for organizational adaptation and survival.

In a very important way, adaptive analytics processes help companies cope with constantly changing external forces, such as new regulatory compliance requirements, market dynamics and competitive pressures.  Analytics are also critical for monitoring internal functions and change programs to provide context, transparency and agility for identifying issues and responding to potential problems before they become emergencies.

For example, major regulatory changes including Revenue Recognition (ASC 606 and IFRS 15), Lease Accounting (ASC 842 and IFRS 16), the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and others are all impacting compliance requirements for companies throughout the world.  Analytics are the key for successfully unifying internal processes and data to meet these external demands.

With so much external change going on, it’s vital that your organizational sensory and response systems be agile, transparent and comprehensive. To succeed, you need to simultaneously see the big picture and have the flexibility to drill down for detail across a widening range of compliance requirements.

At Bramasol, while working with a broad spectrum of companies across many industries on their compliance and financial transformation initiatives, it has become clear that “analytics” needs to be treated as a core strategy for overall success – with a comprehensive and highly adaptive approach.

Our go-to analytics technology stack spans the creation of purpose-built tailored solutions for issues such as Leasing and RevRec compliance, combined with user-friendly overall dashboards, such as the SAP tile-based analytics launch pad below.

Companies need end-to-end integrated solutions for compliance that fit seamlessly within existing operational and financial systems while providing the detailed information, audit trail, aggregation methodologies and advanced analytics to support disclosure reporting.  In addition, company management needs assurance that these end-to-end solutions are capable of being adapted and updated as compliance and disclosure requirements are fine-tuned or to meet special situations.

While there is no easy one-size-fits-all solution for all companies, it is useful to leverage core analytics technologies that can readily adapt to unique requirements while also meshing with existing legacy systems and laying the foundation for forward-looking business strategies.

For example, we’ve standardized on the SAP Digital Core, SAP Cloud Analytics and S/4HANA because these technologies provide flexiblity, scalability and performance for agnostically integrating and anlyzing data from virtually any existing systems and/or legacy data repositories. 

In addition, we’ve gone the extra step of creating purpose-built analytics and disclosure solutions for Rapid Leasing Compliance and Rapid RevRecReady Compliance.  By leveraging these targeted products, companies that just need quick and easy-to-deploy solutions can get up an running fast for basic compliance while also creating a solid foundation for adapting their analytics to meet future needs.

Comprehensive analytics are a key element in any company’s journey of Compliance, Optimization and Financial Transformation.  Beginning with advisory services and analytics integration, with pre-defined disclosure reports and purpose-built out-of-the-box solutions, these core analytics tools enable companies to comply quickly and then optimize their operational processes for driving transformational change.

Only by creating a multi-faceted sensory and analysis strategy that holistically unifies the entire organization can today’s companies hope to stay healthy and compete in today’s global environment.

Learn more by visiting Bramasol’s Financial Transformation solutions.

For the past forty years, companies have been building all their financial and business decisions around information contained in traditional data structures. Virtually all financial systems, no matter who has designed them, have been built around relational databases.  This brings the same set of issues and challenges to every single system.

The primary limiting factor with every relational database is a relatively finite limit as to how much data it can contain without compromising performance.  In most companies, these finite relational database limits have already been outstripped by the flood of new data that is constantly being created.  In response, virtually all companies have resorted to segmentation of their information into different standalone databases for faster manipulation and management. 

For example, the General Ledger is often separated from sub-ledgers and other critical functions such as profitability analysis, revenue recognition and management reporting are relegated to standalone programs and dedicated servers.

Although the goal of segmentation is to achieve faster performance from each database, every time a function or data set is handled separately, informational gaps are created. This sets in motion a myriad of problems from different understandings of what is supposedly the same information based on where and how the data is stored.  The result is a need for constant reconciliation of data drawn from different databases and the imposition of rigid “data cleansing” processes before any decisions can be made.

Of course, these interim steps to cleanse and validate the data are cumbersome, time consuming and a big drain on productivity.  Managers can sometimes spend much more time debating the accuracy of each other’s data than they actually spend on making decisions.

In recent years, thought leaders have been grappling with the above issues in an effort to find effective ways of unifying these separate data repositories with the core processing of transactions.  Overall goals have been to increase accuracy, efficiency and performance by eliminating the need to massage, analyze, reconcile and move data before acting on it, while at the same time accelerating transaction speed.  Steady improvements in chip performance, memory speeds and in-memory software architectures have now made those goals achievable.

By leveraging the in-memory data and processing capabilities of the SAP S/4HANA architecture and S/4HANA Cloud deployment scenarios, CFOs can seamlessly unify their information landscape to remove the gaps and ease the pain-points arising from the artificial segmentation of information.

Instead of always grappling with reassembling disparate pieces of the picture this approach enables CFOs and staff throughout the company to see a holistic real-time view that encompasses all operational data sets and analysis capabilities within a single unified architecture.

In addition to improving both the access to and the ability to manipulate information, S/4HANA also dramatically improves real-time analytics performance because nothing must be moved, massaged or reconciled before the analysis.

With S/4 HANA you now have access to all the data in real time. So how does this change the paradigm for how we approach data? In the past we struggled to get data. You had to abstract it, put it into files and then use what you had. I know that as a user of data we had to think long and hard about what data we needed to answer specific questions.

The heart of this new unified approach is the Universal Journal, which now enables the long-sought after "Single-Source-of-Truth" for decision making. It embodies the concept that all the data is unified within an unsegmented database so that all processes and people see the same set of information in real time. 

This is possible because S/4HANA offers three transformative innovations:

1. Enables a 7 to 10 times compression of data to greatly shrink the data footprint
2. Takes the data off disk and puts it into main memory so it’s immediately available
3. Makes real-time information available to front-line users via flexible S/4HANA deployment scenarios and personalized User Interface technologies

Leveraging S/4HANA has enabled a complete re-imagining of the whole financial architecture and structure of applications so that everything can be driven in real time from the single SAP Intelligent Digital Core.

Once everyone is working with the same information and operating in sync with each other, the single-source-of-truth also begins to inform high-level strategies and long-term planning processes.   Instead of constantly struggling to understand where you are, the whole team can turn their focus and energies toward getting where you want to be.

Now that we have instant access to raw transaction level data, and are constantly adding more data with technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning, companies need partners, such as Bramasol, who are experts in deploying solutions with the agility and scalability to handle escalating data and transaction processing requirements.

Bramasol is a co-innovation leader in the implementation of the SAP S/4HANA (On-Premise and Cloud) to help customers achieve high-performance results with in-memory capabilities and extensible Digital Core. 

Our capabilities include leveraging S/4HANA technology in purpose-built offerings such as our Rapid RevRecReady Compliance Solution and Rapid Leasing Compliance Solution as well as helping our customers incorporate S/4HANA benefits into their on-going Finance Innovation initiatives.

Click here to request a demo of S/$HANA Cloud and get expert answers to your specific needs.

Today’s corporate finance professionals face an accelerating set of new challenges, changing compliance requirements and global competitive pressures that threaten to overwhelm the inherent limitations of their existing legacy finance and ERP systems.

Most conventional finance management technologies have been in existence for decades and, while they offer a familiar environment, they have significant limitations when it comes to keeping pace with today’s complex and dynamically changing corporate challenges.

Some of the chronic challenges that arise from these limitations include:

• Too much time and energy spent on inefficient month-end & year-end close processes
• Difficulty acquiring and accessing accurate data for financial reporting
• Time wasted reconciling reports based on conflicting data sets
• Inability to extract timely ad hoc data for operational decision-making

Layered on top of these enduring issues are new challenges driven by major changes in the compliance and regulatory environment.  These include:

• Revenue Recognition Changes (ASC 606 and IFRS 15)
• Lease Accounting Changes (ASC 842 & IFRS 16)
• Financial Instruments Impairments & Disclosures (IFRS 9)
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for companies doing business in the EU

Of course, the overarching challenge facing CFOs is their responsibility to handle all the above issues while also providing strategic and tactical leadership to meet their companies’ business goals for growth, market share, and profitability amid increasingly dynamic and globally competitive environments.

In working with a wide range of companies, across multiple industries, our Bramasol team has seen a variety of mindsets on the part of C-Suite decision-makers when it comes to addressing these issues. 

Most people thankfully have now abandoned the “head in the sand” approach and are actively grappling with the reality that the need for compliance-driven changes can’t be ignored. 

But the majority of CFOs and CEOs can do more to fully embrace the new compliance regulations as an opportunity for driving transformative changes across the organization.  Many of these companies are attempting a piecemeal approach to compliance based on ad hoc point solutions, spreadsheets, and other short-term fixes. Ultimately, this limited-scope mind-set almost always costs more and delivers less than can be achieved with a broader and more integrated approach.

On the other end of the spectrum are proactive forward-looking company leaders who see these external compliance-driven change-drivers as major opportunities for truly transformative finance innovation.

As part of our efforts to serve the whole range of companies’ needs, from those that just want to put their toe in the water and comply to those who are proactively committed to financial transformation, we’ve focused on creating targeted purpose-built solutions for compliance that that also can readily integrate with big-picture financial transformation initiatives.

We fundamentally believe that Compliance Innovation lays the foundation for Finance Innovation.

So how does a company go about getting targeted cost-effective compliance in the near-term along with a transformative path forward to overall Finance Innovation?  Well, for those companies that are already invested in SAP technologies, the answer is S/4HANA and S/4HANA Cloud.  Looking at the SAP roadmap, it is clear that S/4 HANA will be the future for all SAP-based companies and that virtually everyone will undertake migration projects to implement S/4 HANA over the next two to three years. 

Given the near-future reality of S/4 HANA as the core SAP technology platform, coupled with the excellent and cost-effective S/4 HANA Cloud functionality available right now, we believe in charting a path that takes maximum advantage of today’s compliance-driven requirements to usher in tomorrow’s financial transformation.

Our immediate compliance activities have been focused on integrating purpose-built applications such as SAP Revenue Accounting and Reporting (RAR) for revenue recognition (ASC 606 and IFRS 15) along with SAP Lease Administration by Nakisa and SAP Real Estate (RE/FX) for lease accounting (ASC 842 and IFRS 16).  We augment these specialized applications with pre-packaged solutions such as RevRec Disclosure Reporting, Lease Data Extraction/Abstraction/Migration, SAP Cloud Analytics, Cloud for Planning and flexible integration tools that span existing ECC and SD environments with future-leaning S/4 HANA capabilities.

This forward-looking journey to the future with S/4 HANA and the digital core can effectively unify and integrate these four key arenas 1) Cloud-based technologies, 2) Data unification, 3) Mobile access everywhere and 4) People-oriented usability and personalized processes.

You might say we’re betting the farm on a future built around S/4 HANA, but in truth all companies that use SAP software today have already made that same bet.  They just may not have given the future much thought as they grapple with the pressing issues of today.  But, if we all stop and take a look ahead, it’s clear what is coming – and it is S/4 HANA, either on-premise or in the cloud (or both).

Those companies that acknowledge this reality today and align their near-term compliance efforts with an S/4 HANA enabled future, will reap the benefits by putting all the puzzle pieces together to not only Comply but also to Improve Customer Engagement, Increase Profitability, Better Manage Inventory and Assets, Streamline Operational Processes, and Optimize Cash Generation.

In summary, by creating Compliance Innovation solutions for today with built-in Finance Innovation and migration opportunities for tomorrow, companies can cost-effectively leverage a highly extensible technology-stack that limits any dead-ends or throw-away implementation efforts along the way, and positions them to grow and be nimble in a competitive environment while addressing new complex regulations.  A company cannot achieve Finance Innovation without mastering regulatory compliance in a streamlined and strategic manner.

To learn more about these opportunities.

On the occasion of our 20th Anniversary we want to take a moment to thank everyone who made this incredible journey possible. Most importantly, though, we thank you our customers, our partners and
our people without whom we could not be celebrating 20 years as an SAP Business Partner.

Dave Fellers, CEO
Bramasol
The Leader in SAP Revenue Recognition

When January 1, 2017 arrives, companies across all industries that follow US GAAP and IFRS rules will be required to comply with the new five-step model for revenue recognition.  On May 28, 2014, the FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) issued converged guidance on recognizing revenue in contracts with customers.  The process calls for implementation during 2016 and “go live” reporting under the new standards in 2017.

Unlike the previous revenue accounting standard that was industry-specific and transaction-specific, the goal of the FASB and the IASB in the new standard is to introduce uniformity and predictability to revenue recognition practices. Among the industries that are likely to experience significant changes are aerospace, asset management, construction, real estate, software and telecommunications. Changes won’t be limited to these industries, therefore all companies need to develop an implementation plan. 

The new rules mandate Five Steps in the revenue recognition process as follows:

While it may seem like a long time until January 2017, the sweeping nature of these mandated changes requires an early start on implementation planning for a smooth transition and full compliance.

For a successful RevRec implementation, "early" means "Now".  Most companies will need to do a significant amount of preparatory work and accounting assessment during 2015 before they can start to implement any system changes. They also need to have a well-planning schedule for piloting the new processes throughout 2016 in order to be ready for the January 2017 "go live" mandate.

To help companies get ahead of the curve on their pre-planning and structured implementation programs, Bramasol has developed an overview eBook for Assuring Success with New Revenue Recognition Requirements.  This eBook outlines the Five Key Elements that must be addressed starting ASAP and lays out a road map to help keep implementation on track from now to January 2017 and beyond.