Go from Zero to Finance Hero
Hubble® is a registered trademark of insightsoftware.com International. © 2014-2015 insightsoftware.com International. All Rights Reserved.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
A New Finance Reality
CHAPTER 2
What’s Your Status Quo?
CHAPTER 3
How does BI Stack Up?
CHAPTER 4
So What’s the Better Solution?
CHAPTER 5
What Does this Mean for my Finance Team?
A new finance reality
As a finance professional, you’re well aware that
financial teams in modern businesses are facing more
pressure than ever before. The board and the CEO
are asking for a more strategic contribution to the
company’s growth. Rapid changes in technology, the
ongoing drumbeat of finance department process,
and the sheer amount of new responsibilities are
adding stress to your role. This is forcing you to
balance between keeping the financial trains running
on time, being flexible enough to change with the
times, and strategic enough drive high performance
throughout the business. There is a responsibility
to be able to not only provide the business with
information and insights but also foresight into future
direction and growth. And you need to do it all while
maintaining your day job.
Getting all this done surely takes superhero skills,
doesn’t it?
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Why is it still so hard to give business users the
information and direction they need, when and how
they need it? The volume and level of transactional
data is growing faster and faster than ever before.
Your ERP system is fantastic at collecting and storing
this information, but it’s often very difficult to gather
real insights from it.
The problem is, most ERPs were designed decades
ago. Not only are they inflexible for end users,
but they are often incapable of handling all the
complexities of a modern business. This may be
true, but at the same time, you’ve invested a lot of
money and resources into your ERP, and it is the
financial heart of your business. So what do you do?
In order to make sense of all this, you dump volumes
of data into spreadsheets, or offline systems that
are disconnected from your actuals. Either way, the
instant you move data out of the ERP, processes
start to break down.
02
It’s time for things
to change
There has to be a better way than this...
Take a look at your processes for reporting, planning,
month-end close, and analytics. More often than
not, these processes are inefficient, error prone,
insecure and extremely time-consuming for finance.
But somehow, we have reached a point where we
have just accepted that it is all in the cost of doing
business. We’ve settled for inconsistencies in data,
spending hours nose deep in spreadsheets, and questioning our numbers.
But, let’s be honest, the fact that 52% of CFO’s see data accuracy as the
biggest obstacle to doing their job (according to The Economist) screams
that something has to change.
It all starts to feel like a lose-lose situation, doesn’t it?
We believe that if you can fix the most important processes in finance; like
those around reporting, planning, and analytics, it may give finance a few
more winks of sleep at night. This ebook is designed to give you, your team,
and your company tangible ways to go from “zero” to finance hero in a few
straightforward steps. No running required, just some light reading through
the rest of this ebook. Shall we?
Go from Zero to Finance Hero
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03
What’s Your Status Quo?
F
irst things, first. Let’s evaluate your current status
quo. To do so, let’s look at your finance team.
Think of the ways in which they work and what
is expected of them. Now take a mental poll. Are they
spending the majority of their time searching through
data, or providing strategy and direction to the business?
maxed out. But is their time being taken up by the right
things? To run a high-performing finance department,
it’s important that finance is focused on analyzing data
and providing strategic information and insights to the
business – not tied down by broken processes and
spreadsheets.
We are betting, they too, are feeling frustrated, frazzled
and potentially fed up. Fed up with the inflexible
nature of their ERP and all the business processes that
are suffering from it. When employees feel like this completely paralyzed - their productivity and morale
declines. Without access to real-time data and analytics,
balls get dropped, and personal and corporate goals
are missed.
We’ve found that the answer to this finance frustration
is not buying solutions that cause you to take data out
of your ERP. Because, as we know, more disconnected
systems will only result in more problems. Our approach
is completely different – we’re all about companies
investing in the ERP by applying leading-edge
technology to it. When you get your single source of truth
to work at the speed of your business, processes like
reporting, planning, and analytics become streamlined
and simple. This frees up finance to invest strategically
in the business.
If your finance team is manually manipulating data
and constantly fielding questions and requests for
information from the business, it’s going to keep them
Go from Zero to Finance Hero
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04
How to Get There from Here
What is High Performance?.
Well that sounds all great, but you may be thinking that this concept is
very far from your current reality. As we discussed, your status quo may
be made up of frustrated, consumed finance professionals who have no
choice but to resort to spreadsheets and offline data to get through their
day.
Try to imagine your ideal workflow. We think it will have at least these
three elements: it’s simple, fast and empowers users to answer their own
questions exactly when they need to. If this “ideal world” was realized, the
potential for a high performance business can evolve. Gartner defines
a high performance workplace as a physical or virtual environment
designed to make workers as effective as possible in supporting business
goals and providing value. A high-performance workplace results from
continually balancing investment in people, process, physical environment
and technology, to measurably enhance the ability of workers to learn,
discover, innovate, lead, and to achieve efficiency and financial benefit.
But the solution is actually quite simple. Addressing the core issue that
is jamming up your team – your inflexible business systems – is all you
need to really focus on. We don’t want you to breakup or replace your
systems, but rather return to your ERP and give it some love. By focusing
on keeping your information in one system that everyone can use, driving
a high performance culture becomes quite easy.
Go from Zero to Finance Hero
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One way to achieve high performance is to invest in more products or
services. For many companies, this seems like the most logical thing
to do when they are faced with inflexible business systems that aren’t
giving them what they need. But this approach often leads down a path
of spending millions for business intelligence (BI) services or consulting.
Unfortunately, these types of investments require companies to remove
data from the source of truth (the ERP) to find business answers. More
money, time, and effort is spent just to receive stale data and create
processes of spreadsheets and roadblocks.
05
How Does Business
Intelligence Stack Up?
T
he truth is, the BI market came about because of people’s frustrations with their
ERP. But because the ERP world was so complex, vendors built BI solutions
outside of it in a whole new data warehouse environment. This is great for
dashboards and summary information for executives, but it doesn’t serve the whole
business well. Once it’s outside the ERP, real-time drilldown to transactional data
becomes nearly impossible to do. And of course there is the issue of data latency
that can really halt visibility and access to information.
Since then, a whole new market of Business
Performance Management (referred to as BPM, but
also known as Corporate Performance Management
[CPM] or Enterprise Performance Management
[EPM]) solutions have come about. They aim to
serve all different types of users - from the top to the
trenches with reporting, planning, and analytics. But
we still see a major flaw in many of these solutions.
They don’t fully understand or integrate directly
with the source of truth – the ERP. When this is the
case, no matter how robust the functionality, finance
will still struggle with their processes.
So what’s the better solution?
As mentioned above, the simple concept of investing in your ERP will eliminate
the common process challenges that finance professionals see. By eliminating
the obstacles of offline data, it’s easier to achieve high performance throughout
the organization. The best path to doing this is investing in what we call a Financial
Performance Management (FPM) solution - because it understands, and connects
directly to your ERP.
A proper FPM operates across three key pillars, in real-time without breaking the link to
your ERP data. It’s also designed to speak the native languages of your critical business
systems, resulting in amazing simplicity and super-fast processes.
Go from Zero to Finance Hero
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06
Hubble Secret Sauce
Hubble is the only integrated FPM solution that moves beyond inflexible
financial systems to bring value to the business in all three key areas:
financial reporting, financial planning, and financial analytics.
FPM will help you do better and we believe it’s our calling to help you get
there. All it takes to get your business operating at high-octane performance
levels is a new perspective that’s rooted in your ERP (and of course, Hubble’s
Secret Sauce).
What is it you ask? Well we’re happy to give you a little
preview of our recipe!
Our People. We all have two things in common - a deep understanding
of ERPs, finance and systems, and an authentic passion for serving the
customer.
These two things are actually embedded in our software. Hubble
understands your business systems – instead of merely connecting to
them. This innate knowledge makes it easier for non-technical users to
create their own reporting, dashboards and planning workflows. It takes just
days, not months, to do this. How you might ask? Hubble provides hundreds
of prebuilt templates that cover every module
within the ERP. This includes finance modules,
like GL, accounts receivable and fixed assets, but
also across the breadth of the ERP like distribution,
HCM, or manufacturing. Immediate visibility to data
as it needs to be seen, helps business users and
finance drive business performance.
Go from Zero to Finance Hero
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Our Software. We see the good in most. That’s why,
even though your business systems might be killing your
performance, we know they are vital to your organization.
Our goal is to bring your critical systems out of the 20th
century by applying leading-edge technology. This way,
you no longer compound the problem by adding more
independent, disconnected systems - you fix the core issue
instead. When you do this, all your data is accurate, relevant, and timely –
just as it should be.
Our Logic. We don’t think our methodology is genius. It stems from the
simple idea that these processes and our day-to-day jobs should just be
easy. Hubble never breaks the link with your critical business systems,
like your ERP or your CRM. So with everything integrated, everyone
works in real-time from a single source of truth, and
the redundant processes associated with disparate
systems just disappear. No more spreadsheets
needed to manipulate data, no more expensive data
warehousing needed for summary and dashboards.
Users have access to see the data exactly in the way
they want to see it, within just seconds.
Hubble doesn’t just stop with financial data. It’s easy to capture and integrate
other data sources to the ERP. So if you need to see CRM data, like pipelines
and sales forecast, it can be integrated with your financials for a live view.
Maybe it’s Google Analytics information that you want visibility to? That’s
easy to do as well. This creates a panoramic view of the whole business in
real-time.
07
So What Does this Mean for my Finance Team?
Our combination of people and passion, data and technology, and maintaining the link
with your critical systems is the key to delivering high performance to your business.
Once you resolve this core problem of disconnecting your data from its source and using
other systems (like spreadsheets and email) to work with the data you are well on your way
to a much better place. You can then get on with the mandate – be more strategic, help
the company grow and keep the finance trains on track and on time. Only then can you
begin your journey from zero to finance hero in the realm of financial reporting, analytics
and planning.
Financial Reporting - everyone is connected in real-time around a single source of truth for
consistent, accurate decision-making. End users are enabled to create and run their own
reports, or answer ad hoc inquiries right within the system – eliminating the need for costly
technical resources. Reports are created in minutes and run in seconds, with easy flexibility
to run calculations, variances, or drill down directly to source data.
Financial Analytics - Easily connect data from every facet of your organization to your ERP
for personalized dashboards and visuals. This ensures everyone is working at optimal speed
and making decisions with clarity. Users from all levels of the business can access their own
personal or business goals just as they liked to see it – metrics, graphics, KPIs, dashboards,
visualizations, and more.
Financial Planning - unite all your people around a continuous planning process that is
connected, data-driven, and fast so you are always one step ahead. With a planning tool that
doesn’t break the link with the ERP, you can solve the all the core problems that cause you
to resort to spreadsheets – so you can focus on using spreadsheets for only what they excel
at – modeling. Models can be uploaded with just a simple link. Managers that need to input
data for budgeting, forecasting, and planning, can easily go into the system themselves and
do so – always ensuring everyone involved in the process is working from the same live data.
Go from Zero to Finance Hero
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08
N OW W HAT? IT IS TIME TO BE COME A HE RO
Take Action
Sometimes the first step is the hardest one to
make – but we invite you to look at what Hubble
can offer your finance team and business and
take a listen to our customers.
Becoming a hero means going above and beyond
to change the status quo. To create a new finance
team culture where easy, relevant insightful
information becomes the norm and you’re
looking further ahead than the competition. You
have it in you and we’re here to bring it out.
Real-time, relevant and accurate data gives you
a chance to help turn your company into a high
performing organization. You want reporting,
planning and analytics tools that are integrated
with the financials that live in the ERP – and that’s
our Hubble Secret Sauce.
Hubble can transform your job, your colleagues’
jobs and your company. It’s easy to install,
produces near-instant results, is cost-effective
and can transform you into a finance hero. You
grab the cape, we’ve got the rest.
Get in touch with us today and learn more
about what we can do for your team.
Hubble® is an integrated suite of performance management apps from insightsoftware.com. It offers reporting, analytics and planning in a single real-time
solution that fully understands your ERP. Hubble integrates your critical business systems so users at all levels have access to live data—extraordinarily fast.
With this type of visibility, everyone can easily understand, manage and predict the business.
Hubble® is a registered trademark of insightsoftware.com International. © 2014-2015 insightsoftware.com International. All Rights Reserved.