Digital Financial Reporting

An FSN white paper, Restoring harmony to the ‘Last Mile’ of Finance with Cadency Complete, articulates both the problem and the solution of getting financial reports out the door.  You can read the entire white paper at the link above.  Below is the summary of that white paper:

SUMMARY
 
Many corporate finance functions are struggling to cope with the unrelenting burden of compliance and regulation coupled with unprecedented market volatility and risk. While there has been significant progress in the collection and consolidation of data, there is rising dissonance and discord in the ‘Last Mile’ of finance. Content management does not sit easily with finance functions more accustomed to working with numbers and spreadsheets. They neither have the enabling technologies nor time to streamline the haphazard processes that characterise the Last Mile.
 
Numbers, narrative and XBRL all coalesce around the last half of the Record to Report cycle and traditional approaches such as ERP, Microsoft Office and niche products have done little to alleviate the challenges. As a result multiple stakeholders are left to fend for themselves – everyone working to a different beat as they each set about producing reports for different stakeholders more or less independently using outdated technology.
 
But these reports have much in common and the key to the way forward is to create the conditions in which individuals from different functional areas can collaborate, i.e. to create a ‘many-to-many’ environment in which multiple stakeholders and document authors can work in parallel, sharing content where necessary and re-purposing it for the many delivery channels in which information has to be published.
 
Cadency Complete is a next generation Disclosure Management product that utilises the ‘Best in Class’ technology (Microsoft, Adobe LiveCycle and Fujitsu respectively) for the three pillars of disclosure management, namely; document authoring, content management and XBRL. These three components work rhythmically to streamline the processes of the Last Mile, complementing legacy investments in ERP and other operational systems.
 
By joining all stakeholders, whether inside or outside of the corporate firewall, in a single seamless environment Cadency Complete is able to restore harmony to the Last Mile, providing complete visibility of the process, while enabling a higher level control, accuracy and productivity – giving the CFO peace of mind and confidence in the integrity of any reports and disclosures.