Here's a statistic that should concern every CFO: according to 2024 research from Accenture, finance teams spend 85% of their time on data triage-gathering, validating, and reconciling numbers. Only 15% of their time goes to the strategic work they were actually hired to do.
If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. The reality is that most CFOs today can't confidently answer a deceptively simple question: "Where did this number come from?"
The problem isn't a lack of data. It's that your financial information lives in what one observer aptly called "multiple sources of half-truths"-scattered across different systems, geographies, time zones, and administrators. Point-of-sale data sits in one system, HR data in another, accounting entries in yet another.
Getting data from point A to point B in clean, reliable form becomes an exercise in frustration. Excel macros proliferate. Currency conversions happen manually. Different departments use different definitions for the same metrics. What one team calls "revenue," another might define entirely differently.
The consequences compound quickly:
Reporting cycles drag on for days or weeks when they should take hours. Monthly close becomes a dreaded ritual rather than a routine checkpoint.
Ad hoc requests get sacrificed. When executives need quick data to inform a decision, the teams responsible for pulling it together find ways to avoid the work-not out of laziness, but because the process is genuinely overwhelming.
Critical decisions get delayed or compromised because accurate data isn't readily available when it matters most.
Employee frustration builds. Your best finance professionals know things could work better. Immature tech stacks become a leading reason talented people leave for organizations with more modern approaches.
The solution isn't another reporting tool or dashboard. It's building a foundation that makes reliable financial data accessible across your organization.
Think of it as creating a single source of truth-one that connects your various accounting systems, maintains consistent definitions, and provides an audit trail for every change. When someone asks where a number came from, you should be able to drill down from a consolidated balance sheet to individual journal entries in seconds, not days.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Imagine having multiple business units-each using different accounting systems. One uses Dynamics, another QuickBooks, a third uses Xero. Instead of manually consolidating these at month-end, you see a real-time group view with standardized financial statements across all entities.
You can switch between currencies instantly. Drill down from high-level P&L to specific journal entries. Compare actuals against budget or forecast. All while maintaining complete confidence in the numbers.
Every accounting system has a different chart of accounts. Getting them to speak the same language for group reporting typically means endless Excel mapping exercises that become outdated the moment someone adds a new account.
A better approach uses a centralized management application where authorized users can maintain mappings, add new accounts, and ensure consistency-all while maintaining a complete audit trail of who changed what and when.
Most organizations maintain budget versions in Excel: Budget_v2, Budget_v3_final, Budget_v3_ACTUAL_final. After a few iterations, no one remembers which version is current.
A proper financial intelligence solution maintains planning data centrally. Different stakeholders can work on their portions, upload changes, and the system tracks versions automatically. You always know what the current budget is and can trace how it evolved.
One of the hidden costs of fragmented systems is semantic drift-different teams gradually develop different definitions for the same metrics. ROI might mean one thing to operations and something else to finance.
A business glossary codifies your KPIs with clear definitions, calculation methods, ownership, and thresholds. When you calculate EBITDA or customer acquisition cost, everyone uses the same formula. No more debates about whose version is "right."
There's tremendous pressure on finance leaders to adopt AI. But here's the truth: AI only amplifies what you put into it. If your data is fragmented and inconsistent, AI will confidently give you wrong answers based on that flawed foundation.
Real AI readiness means building proper data governance first. When your financial data is clean, consistently defined, and properly structured, then AI becomes genuinely useful. You can ask natural language questions-"Show me profit for 2024 by business unit as year-to-date figures"-and get reliable answers in seconds.
Imagine heading into a board meeting and being able to query your data in real-time as new questions emerge, rather than promising to "circle back next week." That's the difference between AI built on a solid foundation versus AI force-fitted onto fragmented systems.
The technical work moves faster than most CFOs expect. Connecting data sources, building transformations, creating financial statements-that typically takes under eight weeks for the core foundation.
What actually takes time is organizational alignment. The challenge isn't whether the technology can integrate with your systems (if it has an API, it can be connected). The challenge is getting the various stakeholders who own different systems to acknowledge this as a priority and provide access.
Once management commits, the technology piece moves quickly. Days to sign paperwork and establish connections, weeks to build the foundation, then continuous expansion as you layer on additional capabilities.
Your finance team shouldn't spend 85% of their time on data triage. They should spend their time on the strategic work that actually drives the business forward-identifying opportunities, spotting risks, guiding investment decisions.
The path forward isn't about buying another tool. It's about building proper financial intelligence infrastructure: unified data, consistent definitions, clear audit trails, and controlled access. Everything else-better reporting, faster closes, AI capabilities-follows naturally from that foundation.
The question isn't whether to build this foundation. It's how long you're willing to keep operating without it.
Want to see how consolidated financial reporting works in practice? Watch our recent webinar where we walk through a live demo of multi-entity financial consolidation, KPI management, and AI-powered analytics.
.png)
.png)
