Ventana Research expanded its core Office of Finance focus areas this year to reflect new and important opportunities to use technology to gain effectiveness through greater efficiency. The focus area we caption as “Purchasing, Sourcing and Payments” also includes receivables. Doing a better job of record-keeping and organizing paperwork, especially in a minutiae-laden process like order-to-cash, may seem trivial. Yet, when the pandemic required organizations to lock down in early 2020,...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Purchasing/Sourcing/Payments
We’ve experienced an unusual, decades-long monetary policy in the developed world that emphasized interest rate repression as well as supply chain practices designed for lowest cost. This has produced a generation of chief financial officers likely unprepared to address the impact of fundamental changes now shaping a new, technology-driven approach to working capital optimization. Today’s CFOs must assess their working capital management processes and the systems that support them to balance...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Enterprise Resource Planning,
continuous supply chain,
digital finance,
Sustainability Management,
Purchasing/Sourcing/Payments
In 2015, I began using the term continuous accounting to call attention to technology advances that enable finance and accounting departments to improve performance. These advances have continued, making an even more compelling case for adoption of continuous accounting.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Purchasing/Sourcing/Payments,
Consolidate/Close/Report
Early last December, just before ChatGPT became the new, bright, shiny object, The Economist magazine ran a story proclaiming that we had finally arrived at the age of boring artificial intelligence (AI). From my perspective, it’s unfortunate that didn’t last and that AI has been relegated back to the buzzword league. AI will be an increasingly important feature of business software through the end of this decade. Ventana Research asserts that by 2026, almost all vendors of software designed...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Intelligence,
Business Planning,
Enterprise Resource Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
continuous supply chain,
digital finance,
AI & Machine Learning,
Purchasing/Sourcing/Payments,
Consolidate/Close/Report
We added purchasing, sourcing and payments to our core Office of Finance focus areas this year to reflect new and important opportunities to use technology to gain effectiveness through greater efficiency. Doing a better job of record-keeping and organizing paperwork – especially in a minutiae-laden process like source-to-pay – may seem trivial. Yet digitally transforming core business processes became essential as the pandemic required organizations to lock down in early 2020, and the need to...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
Purchasing/Sourcing/Payments
Digitally transforming core business processes became essential as organizations locked down in early 2020 because of the pandemic and the need to operate remotely presented a set of new challenges that were best addressed by software. Especially in the areas of sourcing, purchasing and payments, software has the ability to streamline processes, shorten process cycles, reduce unnecessary costs, provide greater visibility into cash flows, increase control and improve results. Digitizing...
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Topics:
ERP,
Office of Finance,
continuous supply chain,
digital finance,
Purchasing/Sourcing/Payments