Finance Operations Teams, are you able to find a needle in the haystack?

From the early periods of personal computing, spreadsheets came into foray and became a mainstay for most business operations.  Finance teams particularly rely heavily on spreadsheets to manage day-to-day operations as well as for more long term tasks such as auditing. For quite a long time, the spreadsheets served the purpose well. However, with the advent of phone-based payments and increase in online commerce, finance departments are getting a deluge of data from multiple sources like payment gateways, banks, aggregators, order systems, acquirers, insurers, treasury, etc.  The spreadsheets-based manual approach which worked previously can barely pull the weight of managing large operations.  And even if they do, finance teams end with a large amount of data scattered across an ever increasing number of siloed spreadsheets.  Auditing these spreadsheets becomes an extremely challenging task as auditors have to combine disjointed spreadsheets so make sense of the data.  To make matters worse, finding a particular transaction with up-to-date information is rather impossible.

Our primary research has indicated that this needle-in-the-haystack problem is faced by companies in multiple industries like payment processing, marketplaces, e-commerce, direct-to-consumer, cloud kitchens, and neo banking.  We also found that customers are definitely looking for solutions to centralise and automate finance operations while improving other elements like tracking, monitoring, auditing, reporting, and searchability. We talked to finance controllers of roughly 65 companies spanning multiple industries and geographies.

An independent study conducted by Deloitte found that a significant number of finance departments are struggling to manage large amounts of data. However, a very few organisations are doing heavy lifting to automate operations and be future ready.