Financial Technology Frontiers

A software company is revolutionizing financial operations through solutions that mine ERP data to provide astounding efficiency.

First, there was the general ledger book. Then came Microsoft Excel and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Revolutionary as these tools have been in the world of finance, there’s room for improvement.

Enter insightsoftware, a leading provider of financial reporting and enterprise performance management software. Formed from the merger of two companies in 2018, and with 16 acquisitions since its inception, insightsoftware is transforming the capabilities of the “Office of the CFO.” Its portfolio addresses a myriad of financial tasks and integrates seamlessly with over 140 ERP systems and Excel for automated data extraction. With tools that are efficient, flexible, and highly secure, insightsoftware is the financial reporting resource of choice for over 25,000 organizations worldwide.

“We offer financial professionals the software tools they need to maintain rigor and security for financial analysis, planning, reporting and other critical tasks,” says Jim Triandiflou, insightsoftware’s CEO. “We’re reinventing the speed and simplicity in which finance teams get their work done.”

ERPsmarts

Of all the tools employed by financial professionals, Excel is the most ubiquitous. Yet it’s hardly perfect. Manual input makes wrangling data a cumbersome task, while Excel’s lack of auditability hampers compliance. Without accurate tracking and auditing, collaboration proves to be more and more unmanageable as teams sift through data to understand results. To resolve these issues, insightsoftware developed its flagship product: an Excel desktop plug-in that automates the gathering and consolidation of financial and operational data while maintaining the Excel user experience. “It looks and feels like you’re working in an Excel spreadsheet,” Triandiflou says. “But it pulls and manipulates data from various systems automatically and eliminates human error.”

Recasting Excel is just one aspect of insightsoftware’s transformative impact on financial technology. Through strategic acquisitions, the company has assembled a targeted collection of programs that stream-line budgeting, treasury, tax, consolidation, reporting, planning, and analytics tasks. These ERP-friendly tools address a critical challenge for many financial teams: how to efficiently access ERP data that spans a company’s operations from supply chain and manufacturing to sales and accounting to generate meaningful insights about a company’s performance. The key is to go deep. “Our tools overlay ERP systems and work at a granular level,” says Triandiflou. “They get into nooks and crannies to extract all the necessary data.” For example, a user of the Budgeting and Planning tool can pull relevant revenue and expense details in a fraction of the time it would take to draft a static Excel document. Then, they can simultaneously get input from various departments via an online version of the budget.

Not only is this a radical shift in basic accounting tasks; it’s also an exercise in risk management. Closing the books for a company with 10 different global entities with various currencies is a monumental feat; automating the process through insightsoftware’s Close and Consolidation tools protect that company from submitting outdated information or error-ridden reports and facing potential government penalties or fines.

If insightsoftware’s contributions to financial technology seem revolutionary, that’s because they are. “Just like the general ledger was once a pencil and book affair that became automated, now all the elements around GL are becoming automated,” Triandiflou says. “And we provide software that does all of it.”