Treasury functions are not easily isolated from the rest of operational applications that are typically spread throughout an organization – nor should they be.  In fact, almost all treasury processes can benefit greatly from becoming more integrated with other business processes. 

However, all too often, companies are enticed by the promises of standalone treasury and risk management applications that claim to be inter-operable but fall short of providing true seamless integration with core ERP business and finance applications.

The strategic importance of treasury has been increasing steadily in recent years, thereby leading to a proliferation of new capabilities from both standalone application vendors and broad-based ERP/finance systems providers.

Companies are also coming under more pressure from shareholders and regulators to increase their transparency and improve financial performance. These expectations are leading to significant changes to the treasury functions as activities are increasingly being centralized. 

At the same time, most companies are experiencing more complexity with regard to changing compliance requirements, diverse global operations, regional and local regulatory mandates, international trade and foreign currency issues, geographically diverse banking relationships and escalating risk factors in the financial arena.

As public companies have worked over the past two years to comply with new ASC 842 and IFRS 16 leasing standards, they have taken a variety of paths to achieve the initial compliance requirements. Depending on each company’s specific requirements and the extent of their lease portfolios, their journey to compliance may have been comprehensive or might have taken a limited approach with a “path of least resistance” philosophy to minimize disruptions. 

However, those companies that took a limited approach using standalone solutions or spreadsheets are now discovering they’re stuck in a dead-end with regard to integrating and optimizing lease compliance within their overall business operations.

As the leading experts in SAP Leasing Solutions for ASC 842 and IFRS 16, we've seen it all and we know what works. Integration can be hard. Data validation is required far more than you expected and reporting is anything but a snap, especially if you need data from your ERP as well as your leasing solution. 

Most companies are continuously dealing with pressures to keep up with changes in their external marketplaces, competitive landscapes, customer needs, and investor expectations. These external issues are also driving internal pressures to improve efficiency, productivity, agility, security and enterprise-wide alignment and integration.

At the recent SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference, Bramasol presented our Comply, Optimize, Transform™ finance innovation approach, which is designed to build on the things that you “have to do” such as Compliance with accounting standards and using those changes to drive Optimization of related business processes. Ultimately, the goal is to leverage the journey through compliance and optimization to achieve Finance Transformation.

In this blog, we are taking a closer look at Machine Learning, which is one of the most important new tools for taking that first step from Compliance to Optimization, while also establishing capabilities to build from for moving from Optimization toward Transformation.

As companies face exponentially growing amounts of data that can overwhelm individuals decision-making ability, the emergence of Machine Learning provides an powerful new method for helping people improve decision-making bandwidth, responsiveness, accuracy and consistency of results.

Bramasol is pleased to announce the release of Bramasol's Insights to Action podcast library of topics covering Regulatory Compliance, Reporting, Disclosures, Financial Management and Financial Transformation technologies.

In previous blog posts, we’ve looked at several key issues facing companies and particularly finance leaders in the Office of the CFO, by covering topics such as Building Finance Innovation on a strong Compliance Foundation, Changing Roles and Responsibilities for the Office of the CFO, The Shift Toward Predictive Accounting, and Analytics is the New Face of Financial Transformation.

Companies operating in today’s diverse global environments face unprecedented challenges with regard to managing capital assets, especially cash accounts that are distributed throughout multiple operating entities in different countries.  These challenges are exacerbated within companies that have grown via merger and acquisition (M&A) strategies, which often results in trying to manage cash accounts across a variety of legacy financial systems.

CFOs and treasury departments need to optimize their companies’ cash agility amidst volatile foreign currency exchange (FX) environments while also complying with constantly changing regulatory environments and escalating global competitive pressures.

At the same time, many companies are realizing that leveraging new treasury-focused technologies and best practices in cash management can provide valuable benefits in terms of improving operating results, maximizing asset utilization and enhancing their ability to quickly respond to new opportunities.

Instituting strong enterprise-wide cash management is also saving valuable time and resources, thereby enabling finance staff to better contribute to high-value activities such as analysis, planning and decision support.

Bramasol, an SAP gold partner, is pleased to participate again this year at SAPPHIRE NOW® and ASUG Annual Conference being held May 7-9 in Orlando, Florida.

People are hard-wired to recognize and interpret faces with amazing speed, accuracy and attention to detail. Even as infants we quickly learn to know our own parents’ faces and to differentiate them from strangers’ faces. Throughout life, the ability to automatically pick up on subtle facial cues and to “read” the meaning behind them are critical factors for streamlining complex social interactions and enabling rapid decisions such as friend vs. foe, and cooperation vs. opposition.

Imagine if you met someone without a face. How would you even begin to interact with them?

Well, that’s how most CFOs and other C-level executives feel when they hear the term “Financial Transformation” without a way to clearly visualize what it means.

Accounting has traditionally been a backwards looking profession.  Let me be clear that I did not just call accountants backwards people, but in general their mandate has been to document, audit and verify what has already happened.

Some of the forces helping make these changes a reality are enterprise-wide integration of advanced analytics, unifying financial information in a single-source-of-truth, movement toward continuous-close processes and the rise of Machine Learning.