How AI enhances Financial Close & Consolidation

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Finance AI Academy, powered by OneStream. I'm Tiffany Ma, and I'm here with Trevor Walker today to talk about how AI enhances financial close and consolidations.

Trevor, thanks so much for being here with us today. Thanks, Tiffany. I'm Trevor Walker, Product Marketing Director for Close and Consolidations here at OneStream, and I'm really happy to be here. Thank you. So, Trevor, let's get into it.

What are some of the ways where AI can help improve financial close, consolidations, and reporting? So, there are a number of ways that AI can add benefit to the close and consolidation process. I like to think about it holistically. When you're starting with the data, let it help you spot anomalies, identify where you have transactional issues, so that that data is clean to kick off the consolidation sort of mid-close, but begin your transaction matching from the very first day of the period, whether that's a month, quarter, or a year in close.

You can use agents to interrogate your data, create financial reports that are highly interactive, so that you can investigate and have full transparency from source to disclosure. It provides, most importantly, efficiency, so that you can break tasks down, so you can create a much more continuous close cycle, rather than waiting for a typical period in scramble, which is how most organizations deal with a close and consolidation process.

Can you explain how these AI components work together to lead to a more continuous close? By applying all of these AI capabilities, it allows you to start the close process sooner, because now you can actually break tasks down into smaller chunks, so that they can be addressed more continuously over the close.

And it allows you to look for the anomalies and exceptions, so that we can tackle them when they occur, rather than waiting to the very end to try to understand why your transactions are not matching or why you've got risk items that are associated with the reconciliations.

You can actually begin to spin up a forecast process a lot sooner while you're still in the close. And so all I'm worrying about is, are the numbers right and do they match, so I can take care of that a lot more continuously across the close. And we like to refer to that as more of a modern close from a OneStream perspective.

You've mentioned continuous close and modern close. Can you just touch up on that briefly, a little bit more in detail?

In OneStream, when we talk about a modern close, it's a technology-enabled, continuous approach to your period and accounting process. You can break tasks down and perform them more readily throughout the month. There's no reason why you have to wait till the end of the month minus five days to start your close.

It's more automated, where these processes run on a more continuous and regular basis. It's unified in OneStream. All of those capabilities come together on the same data and platform so that you can easily match, journal adjust, reconcile, and consolidate more seamlessly across that process.

It's more real-time because that data is immediately available. And more importantly, with the talent crunch that we have today in finance, you reduce all of the crunch time pressures in the close, which creates a much better work-life balance for your team members. And they can also add greater value to the organization. Tell me more about the end process of AI narrative analysis and how that's used in the close process. When you think about disclosure reporting from a close and consolidation perspective, ultimately, you have a couple of different constituents you need to speak to.

First, you have the regulatory bodies that you ultimately need to communicate with, not just supply the financials, but you also need to provide the commentary or the narrative that's associated with it to provide context behind the numbers.

So with our AI capabilities in OneStream, we collect automatically during the close, all of the commentary from everybody that's participating in that close are going to be supplying their comments. So with our AI capabilities, we can summarize any of those commentary, no matter where it's entered, and be able to begin to generate executive-level narratives. It might be used in board packs or investor presentations.

It might be used at the end of the year in an annual report that you're producing, or it might just be commentary that goes along with the actual financials that you deliver to the regulatory agencies globally. So let's shift gears here. Tell me about the art of the possible of how AI can help with the ESG process.

So there's really three primary ways that it can add a lot of value to the ESG process. One would be your AI narrative analysis, because part of the ESG is the collection of narratives in addition to the data. And then you've got your finance analyst to be able to interrogate directly the trusted financial information, and then be able to ask questions of that to be able to understand the numbers to help from a reporting and disclosure perspective.

That's all built natively into the OneStream platform. So we talked about ESG. We talked about transaction matching and narrative analysis. Tell me a little bit more about AI account reconciliations.

This is one where we've embedded one of our sensible AI studio components directly into the account reconciliation solution. As you load in your trial balances, it can automatically run these. We have over 15 anomaly detectors that will, again, will look for missing documentation.

We'll look for timing differences so that you automatically will have, as soon as you walk in, a dashboard that are showing you the anomalies. But you can also, as an end user, trigger that anomaly detection. It provides a lot of opportunity for your account reconciliation individuals to be able to focus on the anomalies, address them as they occur, freeing up time so that you can focus on the ones that have higher risk to the organization.

All right, Trevor. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share your experiences and insights. Thanks, Tiffany. It's been a pleasure.