"I Can Sleep at Night Because I Know What's Underneath My Numbers"

Most finance functions can say their numbers are accurate and on time. Far fewer can say they are transparent, flexible, or efficient to produce. So when the architecture is finally right — cloud native, automated, dynamic enough to move with the business — what does a CFO organisation actually get out of it?

In this segment, host Mark Aubin asks Mike Dolan, Partner at Ernst & Young, for the outcomes he sees in the field, and the first one is not the one most business cases lead with. Drillable financial statements — not one or two clicks deep, but ten or twelve, all the way down and back up again with everything still footing and tying — turn out to change the CFO's relationship with their own reporting more than any efficiency line ever did. Dolan relays the verdict of one CFO on what the real payoff was, and it isn't the one that was in the business case.

He also covers what a rules-oriented subledger environment does to the cost of change when a new standard, product or basis of accounting arrives, and why fixing transparency and flexibility tends to hand you the efficiency gains anyway. See the rest of the series on the Cloud Accounting Subledger from SAP Fioneer.