Accounting and finance teams are being asked to do more than ever to provide actionable analytical insights and help solve business problems on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the haphazard growth of business systems often gets in the way, and the end result is that financial professionals are being overworked and struggling with financial software systems that are simply not up to the task.

Here are some of the most painful ways finance teams are being overworked today:

  1. Financial professionals are forced to deal with disparate systems with little to no integration.
  2. Manual tasks, such as spreadsheet export/import cycles, are required to answer even the simplest business question.
  3. There are no real-time, customizable dashboards available to operational personnel and executives, meaning that every business question has to flow through the financial department.
  4. Mobile access to financial data means grappling with VPN connections, or worse, simply having no access to the information while out of the office.
  5. There is no company-wide standard for KPIs, meaning there is no clear way to compare costs or performance across different departments or divisions without complex, manual calculations.
  6. Subsidiaries are being run on different financial software platforms with no integration or real-time visibility at headquarters, making accurate performance data costly and time-consuming to obtain.
  7. Getting hold of data for company-wide reporting, auditing and decision support requires logging in to multiple data systems or asking for IT assistance.

Fortunately, there is a way out of this mess. NetSuite has teamed up with the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) to find answers to these problems. I will be leading a webinar on February 13 at 1:00 p.m. ET and will be presenting IMA research on how these problems are affecting finance leaders, and will moderate a panel discussion of financial executives who will share real-life insights into how they overcome these obstacles in their own organizations.

After the webinar you'll know how to deal with these seven signs of overwork, and know the way forward to improve company-wide visibility and performance. I hope you will join me for the talk by registering now for this free webinar here. There's even a CPE credit in it for you.

-Vishrut Parikh, Director, Product Marketing at NetSuite