Achieving this overarching view of financials is not always straightforward, especially if your organisation has grown, either organically or through acquisition, to comprise varied on-premises financial management solutions. Growth within a single geography can add complexity. Expand across international borders, and that complexity quickly increases. With multiple, unintegrated finance systems, CFOs and their teams will find it almost impossible to track KPIs across borders and entities in real time.

Cloud ERP, however, helps organizations expand internationally and act as one business, everywhere they operate.

Managing Consolidation

With varied systems across the business, it’s unlikely that leadership will be able to see consolidated financials more frequently than monthly. It’s hard to reconcile intercompany transactions, and both group and local reporting can be manual, error-prone tasks.

With NetSuite OneWorld, however, your entire business’s data is visible all the time, with consolidation right down to transaction level across the group. Multi-book accounting functionality records all transactions correctly according to local standards, and automated posting of transactions simplifies the creation of consolidated financial statements. 100% of surveyed NetSuite OneWorld customers confirmed that they have saved more than 6 days per month producing consolidated financials. Source: TechValidate

This visibility and automation is powerful for international businesses such as ”

Making Localisation Work

When subsidiaries and the group use different charts of accounts or accounting standards, finance teams may need to export, change, or map data and accounts using tools such as Excel. Inevitably time-consuming, these processes introduce the risk of error, make key data hard to find, and complicate the audit process. When countries have different accounting conventions — around invoicing or reconciliations, for example — it adds yet more complexity.

NetSuite’s cloud-based financial management system stores reports on a single database, and teams can configure them to show information in group or local format. The single repository, together with automation, means data is equally easy to find, drill into, and analyse at both the group and local level, which is ideal for auditors as well as finance teams. And third-party apps integrated with NetSuite make it even easier to manage country-specific conventions.

Gaining Insight

If there are changes in one part of the business — say a VAT increase in one country or spiking inflation in another — finance teams can use a cloud-based financial management system to see, analyse, and model the impacts at any time, exploring what-if scenarios based on real data.

This insight is the foundation for giving every department across the business access to key metrics and KPIs. Subsidiaries are no longer isolated, and the central team can readily support them if necessary. This makes it easier to provide continuity in the event of absences or staff changes, too.

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