Modernize the financial close with the power of AI

Welcome everyone. I'm Trevor Walker, Product Marketing Director for Close and Consolidations at OneStream. Today I'm excited for this webinar on modernizing the financial close with the power of AI with ISG Research, covering the ISG Research and findings in the 2025 Record to Report Buyer's Guide. Again, I'm Trevor Walker, Product Marketing Director here at OneStream, and I'm joined today by Rob Kugel, Executive Director of Business Research at ISG Research. Welcome, Rob. Would you do a quick introduction?

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Trevor. I head up the Business Software Research Practices at Information Services Group, a global public company with $250 million in annual revenue. I also lead the Office of Finance Research here, where we cover software for close and consolidation, ERP, business planning, tax, and sustainability compliance.

Thank you, Rob, and welcome. Over the next hour, we'll cover the Record to Report process, why it's important, and the evolution of finance and accounting teams. We'll then look specifically at the Record to Report landscape, the leadership in that, and its evolution.

We'll then dig a little deeper into the case for a more continuous and modern close. We'll look at the role and importance of AI and automation in the Record to Report process. We'll take a slight deeper dive into OneStream's unified platform in the modern close. And we'll wrap up by giving you some action steps that finance leaders can take to try to put everything we cover today into action inside of your organizations.

All right, Rob, let's jump into the webinar. Can you give the audience insights into what Record to Report is, the ISG Buyer's Guide, and how organizations can use it, since that's the focus of our webinar today? Sure. Well, what do we mean when we say Record to Report? For ISG Research, it's all the activities from the time you stop recording to when you're ready to report on your company's financial performance and financial health. It's a set of repetitive tasks that fulfill this core responsibility of the department.

I think if you're really an accountant, it's not the so-called last mile of finance because accounting is a continuous process.

More than a decade ago, I started using the term continuous accounting to highlight how technology makes it possible to rethink how we manage that record to report cycle. Why? Well, in the 1990s, people began talking about the fast, clean close, doing the close in a week or less without compromising quality. Well, today, we still see half companies taking more than a week to close their books. Why? Well, often you hear, that's the way we've always done it. Of course, one of the hallmarks of good accounting is doing the same things the same way over and over again.

And consistency in treatments and everything else is goodness when it comes to accounting. But part of what I call continuous accounting is continuous improvement.

Always looking for ways to improve departmental performance. There was a reason why we did things on a monthly, quarterly, and annual cadence when we used paper and quill pens. But today, technology allows us to change that for the better. We can spread accounting tasks out over a period to avoid workload spikes at the end of the month or quarter. We can close faster without sacrificing accuracy, control, or quality.

Technology makes continuous accounting possible. And technology can also make accounting more useful and strategic to executives and managers. Next slide, please.

When we started Ventana Research back in 2002, our mission was to enable enterprises to make best use of technology. Now, two years ago, we joined ISG to enable us to scale and broaden our reach as part of a global services company.

But years ago, we created the buyer's guide with the goal of producing a fact-based assessment of software applications. We saw the need for a guide that was as objective as possible based on a consistent evaluation of all of the elements that deliver value to users of that software.

And objective is the key word here. Accounting software is a machine tool, not a book or a movie or fashion. So the objective details determine how well and efficiently it works in producing reliable reports and statements.

And it's not just the features and functions. It's the ability of the underlying technology to deliver those features and functions. And it's not just technology. It's the customer experience aspects of owning the software. Our evaluation is a checklist-based process that examines in ways literally hundreds of items that affect how well the software helps people do their jobs and enables enterprises to perform their best.

When we did the record-to-report software evaluations, we put on our virtual green eye shades to see how well the application delivers value to finance and accounting departments.

That said, here's an important point. We do all this hard work to deliver a starting point for buyers, not a final decision. Because no two-by-two matrix can ever tell you the whole story, especially for business applications, because every company has different requirements, environments, and constraints.

So we're here to help you and your organization begin to make the best decision for you and your requirements. Thank you, Rob. As Rob just articulated, technology plays a critical role to the record-to-report process. But so do the people using the technology, our finance and accounting teams.

Technology is driving an evolution of finance and accounting. And I think it's important to also look at this evolution that's currently underway.

Finance teams are being asked to adopt and leverage technology more to streamline and modernize the closed process. This is driving the need for them to evolve from just core finance people to more digital finance. And from just users of the technology to producers with technology.

Estimates are that digital finance talent roles are going to double from 5% to 10% in the next 4 to 5 years. To support this evolution, we need to foster our team's interest in technology and to apply that to streamline processes so that we free up capacity for more leadership, judgment, enablement, and help drive insights and strategy throughout our organizations. I was at a recent conference and one of the speakers talked about finance and accounting people need to adopt more of an athlete's mindset. And I kind of like this.

So if you think about an athlete, what they do every day is all about fulfilling their mission and dream. They think, talk, act, eat, drink, hydrate in a number of different ways, all about helping them to fulfill their goal. And I would advocate that finance and accounting people need to start doing the same kind of things. We need to think, talk, and act differently about ourselves. We need to think about ourselves as technology people doing technology work beyond just the routine tasks of accounting and finance.

And that's actually shared by our CFOs, where 79% believe that finance employees need to update the way they see their jobs and see themselves as individuals.

Second, we need to embrace AI-enabled technology to drive greater efficiency. As Rob just talked about, this concept of continuous accounting, we need to apply that to the close so that we're continuously recording, closing, reporting, and being able to prepare and disclose our financial results. Not necessarily doing that, but always working in that mindset to be able to move along in a much more iterative fashion throughout the close.

We need to embrace and use AI to reduce the manual tasks and automate as much as possible. And we need to continuously monitor our KPIs, metrics, and cash flow, ensuring early detection of issues and discrepancies. Yet, recent studies have shown that 77% of CFOs report that a lack of technical skills within finance is a critical reason that finance and accounting has not yet adopted AI more broadly across the function and their process.

To me, this just reinforces the need for finance and accounting teams to evolve from core finance more towards digital finance.

And finally, we need to embrace automation and drive towards a more continuous and modern close. Many different studies have different numbers, but the one I'm using here is currently 81% of organizations still struggle to close their books in less than five days. Finance and accounting teams continue to operate in much more of a monthly quarterly mindset rather than a daily weekly mindset. We need to start to shift from more of a concentrated end-of -period scramble towards a more continuous and daily process.

So, Rob, now let's go over this year's Record to Report Buyer's Guide research and findings. Sure. Sure. Our 2025 Record to Report Buyer's Guide evaluated 10 software providers that offer both consolidation and close management software. The companies that were in this report have at least 50 million in sales, operate in at least two continents, and have at least 25 customers.

For the close, the software had to have process management, reconciliations management, journal creation, as well as management and analysis and reporting. For consolidation, there had to be process management, statutory consolidation, intercompany management, and journals. And for both, we also evaluated their support for auditors and work they do, as well as AI and generative AI.

All of our Buyer's Guide evaluations are independent of the specifics of software packaging and pricing.

But I think if I had to summarize the whole thing, the good news for buyers is that they have a wealth of choices of software that's either excellent or well above average for the task at a variety of price points. But, of course, one stream leads the pack.

Thanks, Rob. Rob, this research and what we've covered so far means that finance and accounting teams need to move from a monthly, quarterly mindset towards a more daily, weekly, continuous mindset to modernize their close process and with an eye towards continuous improvement that Rob mentioned earlier. So let's look at the case for a more modern close and how you can take steps to move from your current traditional close process towards something that's more continuous.

At a recent conference in London, we announced new AI capabilities and account reconciliations and a new journal entry manager unified with our best -in-class consolidation engine in the OneStream platform.

We are focused on unifying, automating, and helping organizations modernize their close and how to make it more continuous with the goal of de-risking and de-stressing the close process from transaction creation to financial reporting so that you can improve the speed and accuracy of your close, improve productivity by eliminating bottlenecks and spot and address issues and anomalies as they occur, and automating to squeeze manual effort out of your close process so you have time to adapt and change quickly and help drive decision intelligence across your business. Rob,

with all of your years and experience in this industry and the research and the work that you've done on continuous accounting, can you define for our audience what you mean by continuous accounting?

Sure. A decade ago, I coined the term to highlight how technology is able to streamline the close report process, increasing productivity while achieving the same level of accounting quality and assurance with less effort.

It means using technology to spread workloads out continuously over an accounting period so that there's less to do at the end, which means that everyone isn't stressed out and staying late to get the work done. And you might even be able to close sooner. Now, you do this by doing processes like reconciliations weekly, maybe even daily, but not monthly, not just monthly. It also means managing the flow of accounting data continuously in systems from end to end so that there's never any human intervention.

That's important because it means that the data doesn't have to be checked and reconciled over and over again because the systems are providing a high-level control that ensures data integrity.

So with that definition, Rob, how does the record to report that we're discussing during this webinar relate to that continuous accounting concept? Yeah, well, they're both taking advantage of technology to change how we organize and execute accounting processes.

They're both ways to get accurate, consistent, reliable, and auditable financial statements sooner with less time spent on repetitive mechanical work that computers can do as well, if not better, than what human beings can do. And you do that so that there's more time for people to do the things that they do best, things that require experience and judgment.

Technology makes it possible to manage the record to report cycle continuously on a single platform rather than as islands of automation, islands of spreadsheets. Because of that, processes and handoffs are handled smoothly, and the accounting data is always consistent and reliable. So you eliminate any data-related manual steps and all the checking that's necessary to ensure that everything foots, ticks, and ties, because it's the exact number that nobody's touched from the beginning to the end of the process.

So in preparation for the webinar, Rob, we talked about the, you know, clearly we worked on some of these concepts and talked about how we could best relate it to what we're trying to cover today.

And one of the things that was that you made a comment that I thought was important for us to make to the audience. So what's changed that makes continuous close motions more possible today than they were a year or two ago or even longer? Well, yeah, even longer. I think because nobody pays attention to accounting software except maybe you and me, no one's recognized that there's been a steady stream of small but really important refinements in the technology and architecture of financial software over the past 10, 15 years.

And especially in, you know, data architecture and data management, things that I know are fascinating to so many people. So, you know, these are things that don't make headlines, but they've been, you know, dribbling out year after year, creating incremental improvements. And even though we've had electronic accounting systems for decades, it really has only been until recently that technology limitations were making everything run in a kind of batch mode, which means that departments had to keep the same monthly and quarterly cadences they were using back when they had paper-based systems.

But because of the steady stream of improvements that had been dribbling in, but, you know, adding up, these constraints have been lifted, making continuous accounting a reality.

So at OneStream, I'm going to take what Rob talked about. At OneStream, we talk a little bit more about what we call the modern close. And how we define that is a technology-enabled, continuous approach to period in accounting and finance that's first, it's continuous.

Tasks can be broken down and performed throughout the month, as Rob just articulated, rather than just in a compressed window at the end or doing what you've always done, taking best advantage of the technology to help you make those processes more daily, weekly, and more continuous through the month. Second, it's automated. Routine, high-volume tasks like reconciliation, matching, and journal adjustments are automated, enabling you to focus on exceptions and anomalies, as well as analysis and forecasting.

It's unified. At least with OneStream, all close and consolidation activities are performed in the same platform, ensuring a seamless flow of that data to streamline and shorten the overall close process. It's more real-time, with ongoing visibility into KPIs, cash flows, and discrepancies, so that you can resolve them as they occur. It's more strategic.

Accountants move from record keepers to more value creators for their organization, so that they can not only close the books, but also help to facilitate better planning, decision-making, and improving collaboration across departments. And as Rob's touched on already a couple of times, it's a little more human-centered. By reducing the crunch time pressures in the close, the modern close improves the work-life balance and overall team satisfaction, so you can become more strategic partners to the business.

So the modern close is going to enable you to do things more like reducing the crunch time pressures of the close, shifting from a concentrated end-to-period scramble to something that's more continuous or more daily and weekly, so that you can tackle those discrepancies and issues as they occur.

It's unified so that you can streamline close consolidation and financial reporting. You can centralize and create higher-quality journal postings when they surface across ERPs and business units.

You can provide continuous review, reconciliation, and analysis. And it frees time to pivot from simply closing and consolidating to driving more frequent and accurate forecasting and planning.

So at OneStream, our mission is to give you the capabilities and solutions to modernize your financial close by unifying, automating, and de-risking the close with AI insights and unified workflows so that you can automate and de-stress that close so that you can deliver greater value and overall cost of ownership and value that you as a function and you as individuals can deliver to your organizations.

I think the word AI has been used all over the place. I was just looking at some research this morning, the amount of frequency that AI is coming up in board and investor meetings and conversations. So clearly, AI was in the title of our presentation today. So as you can tell, AI, and you know yourself, that AI is now and will continue to play a key role in modernizing the overall close process. So Rob, let's start by getting your insights into the role and importance of AI and automation in the current and the future record-to-report process.

Yeah, well, as long as I remember, and that's quite a while, accountants have been skeptical of technology and reluctant to change. But if you look back, accounting does change with technology.

Few accountants use adding machines anymore, and my apologies to you if you still are. 20 years ago, reconciliations were done manually in almost every company. But today, the majority have automated that process for the better.

20 years ago, most thought manual reconciliations were a given. Now, not so much. In fact, gee, why were we doing that for so long? And maybe five years from now, many, and I hope most of you, won't have to be doing flux analysis. It's going to be automated using AI with people only reviewing the work product to ensure quality. When it comes to AI, I think there's been a lot of hallucinating about AI for the past couple of years.

But it isn't magic. It's a set of scientific methods developed over the past 60 years that reached a tipping point three years ago. Now, using straightforward statistical and other methods, AI augments human experience and judgment, especially in accounting.

And especially in accounting, AI does a faster and a reliable job of matching items, detecting anomalies, finding exceptions, managing exceptions, and in so doing, saving a lot of your time. And then there are agents, which have emerged over the past year as something that people have been talking about. Now, agents also aren't magic. They're just programming elements that perform steps and entire tasks using AI and generative AI and just regular old steps to ensure that processes are performed precisely to ensure compliance while producing insights and fostering collaboration.

AI really means augmented intelligence when you come down to it. Because properly designed, agents and AI provide critical human-in-the-loop automation to enable staff to focus on work requiring their experience, expertise, and insights.

You know, we're only at the start of a long cascade of AI and agentic capabilities embedded in software that you use that's going to automate, you know, only what's reliably automatable. Humans are going to be in charge when they need to be. It's important to be skeptical of technology claims, especially from people who don't understand accounting. But AI and agents will change how every department operates. So be informed. Stay on top of what's here and especially what's coming in the near future because it's coming really fast.

Look at the track record of each software company's ability to deliver reliable innovation. And most of all, be a fast follower in selectively adopting this technology. You don't have to be at the bleeding edge. But you and your organization must be ready to use AI and agents as soon as they've been proven capable and reliable. And that's going to happen, as I said, sooner than you could probably imagine.

There were a couple of things you said that were important there, Rob, in terms of having these capabilities embedded in software to help those processes.

So I wanted to take a couple of minutes to help everyone understand that from a OneStream perspective, to help our customers modernize the close, we are taking that approach. We deliver enterprise finance AI that's trusted, secure, and built for finance within the OneStream platform and embedded into the workflows that our customers and you would use every day. With data and insights you trust because the finance users are the ones creating the AI-powered results themselves.

You don't have to have data scientists working in a silo and then tossing a number back over to finance without any transparency to how that number was derived.

And ours is purpose-built for finance. We offer no-code, AI-powered solutions where a business user, not a data scientist, is the one in control of the entire process from start to finish. So when finance goes into the meeting with their business partners, the board or investors, they know exactly where they got the number, democratizing that AI capabilities for all finance and operational users. Starting with our AI-powered account reconciliations that's unified with our financial reporting capabilities.

Loading your trial balance once, as finance is working through consolidations, accounting is reconciling from that same trial balance to align and help streamline the close. It's powered with our sensible AI-powered system.

And I'll get into that in a couple of moments. You identify exceptions with over 10 pre-configured rules like documentation gaps and balance spikes. Teams can focus on exceptions and manage risks by surfacing and managing exceptions for faster preparation and approvals. And with drill to reconciliation and transactions and transaction matching all from the same place, they get enhanced transparency, control, and risk management. But most importantly, helping to drive greater productivity in the close.

As I said, I get into our sensible AI studio a little bit, which is our one-stop AI library. And no external data science tools, all just developed and available within the OneStream platform, enabling you to do three key things. One is to configure routines.

We have greater than 60 routines that can be used as plug-and-play AI if and when they're needed. So you have the ability to grab, adapt, and extend the capabilities in OneStream in any ways that you can think and need as possible. Second, leveraging deployed solutions. Studio also has turnkey solutions that are powered by routines to enhance your core processes, such as the time series anomaly detection, like we just talked about in account reconciliations.

And you can scale your AI. Studio delivers accelerated production-grade AI in the OneStream platform faster than anyone else, whether it's in the close and consolidation process, planning and forecasting, or in reporting analysis, all focused on delivering that analysis and capability in days versus months and years. And what's most important is it's applied. In the example we have on the right, it's applied for narrative summarization.

I'll step back for a moment. In OneStream, commentary is managed exactly like data. It's stored at the intersections and is pervasive through the platform.

This way, in OneStream, you're able to capture comments everywhere, from variance analysis and narratives to process-based comments. All comments can be aggregated up a hierarchy to provide comprehensive visibility.

And now with our AI-powered narrative summarizer, you can automatically summarize those detailed commentary into high-level narratives for the narrative reporting process, up any hierarchy that you have in your financial models. With multi-language support for both different languages in comments and translations, you can ask questions to better derive the information that you're looking for. And you can have any number of follow-on questions to summarize and analyze exactly as you need.

And Rob mentioned agents. Sensible AI agents bring the conversational AI directly in OneStream. Think of these as your digital teammates. We have three agents that are available. First is our finance agent.

Type your question into natural language to retrieve data sitting inside of your OneStream financial models. For example, show me the year-to-date variance between actuals and budget for each detailed revenue account in North America. Finance analysts will instantly identify the metadata that's associated with your question, things like time, scenario, accounts, and any of you user-defined dimensions like product, channel, region, and so on.

It'll retrieve the insights that you're looking for, and then not just return you a narrative and a static number, but we're going to return that to you in a report, something that we call a cube view, that has full interactivity and analysis capabilities, including the ability to draw all the way back to the source data that's surfacing in that report. Every answer is built on your trusted and governed data in OneStream. So finance analyst also inherits your user security controls to ensure only the right people have access to the data that's being requested.

This capability provides deep financial insights to anyone, every analyst, and even non-finance users, because the data providing users with the insights they need quickly and easily. Okay.

Next is search. If you need an answer to a question that's buried in a document, then you just ask search, and it will retrieve the answer in a matter of moments. This rapid information retrieval capability slashes hours out of document hunting and frees your team to focus on more value-added work or analysis capabilities. All the answers from search are accompanied with all the sources, so you have full transparency into the source document where the answer was found.

In short, our sensible AI agents combine natural language with OneStream's secure, certified data foundation so that you get fast, accurate, and audible insights without any of the heavy lifting.

So why OneStream for the record to report and a more modern close? Well, first, our mission is simple but powerful, to be the operating system for modern finance. We did the hard work so that you can focus on the smart work.

We've brought everything together, not just technically but intelligently. One core finance to unify closed consolidation planning, reporting, and compliance. One operational analytics to align fast -moving operational data with finance.

One AI foundation to forecast, detect risk, and surface insights, all within one place. What's important is with OneStream, it's not a bundle of multiple applications. It's a purpose-built engine for modern finance that's uniquely unified together, infinitely extensible, and AI-powered, all in one single platform, in a plug-and-play architecture that allows you to adapt and grow as your business changes.

You can also choose your path to success. We offer flexible implementation methodologies from CPM Express to Enterprise or Universal with predictable cost and time to success.

Core Finance is the foundational pillar of OneStream's unified platform. It's designed to deliver end-to-end financial control across close, consolidation, planning, reporting, compliance, and audit.

Core is where the trust in the numbers is established. This is your slowly changing data like monthly, quarterly, yearly, actuals, and budgets. It's the financial backbone that ensures that everything else from agility to AI is accurate, aligned with finance, secure, and auditable. These are the functions that the business must do. It's sort of the number cruncher function. Once you leverage this core, then we provide you with an infinite set of capabilities so that you can do more.

At the core of the OneStream platform is our best-in-class consolidation engine that's purpose-built from the ground up with decades of experience in financial consolidation. It isn't just what it does. It's how it does. And because we know in finance, the how matters.

We also embed automation and control directly in the closed process through guided workflows and task force. We also embed a lot of data that's purpose-in-class management, enabling finance teams to quickly identify issues, resolve discrepancies, and move forward throughout the entire cycle with trust in every step. In the same platform, OneStream covers the entire closed process, automating transaction matching, supporting hundreds of millions of transactions per month, AI-powered account reconciliations, and journal entries across ERPs and business units.

And instead of relying on disconnected tools and duplication of data, you can match transactions, reconcile accounts, and book journal entries from the same source data used in consolidation. This means you can start the closed sooner, delivering a more modern closed that's faster, has fewer errors, and less manual effort. And we're bringing the power of AI into the closed processes I just went through, not as a bolt-on, but as a native part of the platform. AI helps to spot anomalies, accelerate reconciliation, and surface insights directly in your workflows.

And Rob talked earlier about the importance of all data coming together to be able to support these processes. So foundational to OneStream in any closed and consolidation process is the need to integrate data and ensure quality at every step. With built-in data integration and quality, OneStream provides a single point of integration, unlike other solutions that stitch multiple tools together.

So you load your data one time, use it across the entire closed process. This means less complexity, let no data gymnastics, and higher trust in your numbers. We embed data quality, validation, and certifications at every step. We drill down and back to source for transparency. And we have always-on audit trails, so every number is traceable from source to disclosure.

This gives your finance teams the confidence to move fast without sacrificing control and accuracy.

So whether you're dealing with complex ownership structures, multiple currencies, or evolving compliance requirements, OneStream delivers a single platform and one version of the truth so that it's all delivered efficiently, intelligently, and with full transparency.

So we've covered a lot during this webinar. And so what Wab and I wanted to do as we get towards the end here is to provide some tangible actions that you can take to apply so that you can take steps to help modernize your own financial close.

So to leverage what we've shared in the webinar today to help streamline and modernize your close, here are some tangible actions that you can take, like assessing your current close and consolidation process, identifying bottlenecks, manual tasks, and areas that are prone to errors. You can use the ISG value index framework to benchmark and evaluate your technology options that you have today and ones that you're looking at in the future.

You can break down your tasks into manageable activities, focusing on anomalies and exceptions more continuously throughout the month. You can unify all of your data and processes so that you have efficiency, transparency, and greater control.

You can start to leverage AI and automation to drive streamlined steps and activities within your closed processes. You can measure the impacts. You can measure the impacts. You can iterate more frequently. And you can adopt some more of the continuous improvement mindset that Rob was talking about before. And you can invest in your digital finance talent and your team skills.

So what I want to do, Rob, is ask you a couple of questions so that you can help the audience understand how they could take everything that we've talked about today and take some, I guess, manageable steps to move forward.

So what role does modern finance technology that we've talked about, whether it's one stream or any other from your ISG buyer's guide, what role does that play in helping organizations achieve a more continuous or automated close process? Yeah,

I think, you know, just to summarize a lot of what you've just been saying, you know, I think in addition to making it possible to eliminate those period end spikes and workloads, we now have systems that make it possible to manage the entire record to report cycle continuously on a single platform, rather than as islands of automation.

And that's important because the platforms are designed so that the data is managed continuously. So data integrity is always maintained, which eliminates having to perform any data-related manual steps and all of the checking that's necessary to ensure that everything foots, ticks, and ties. And because it's one continuous process, there aren't all of those, I don't know, drop balls that seem to happen to a bunch of companies every month because the handoffs are being handled by software.

And especially, I think I mentioned, you know, one of those sources of islands of data and process are spreadsheets. So having everything done on a unified platform and as much as possible eliminating those spreadsheets, that goes a long way to making the process faster, more continuous, more accurate, all with a whole lot less sweat to get to the end result, which are reliable financial statements.

And, Rob, in the interest of time, I'm going to ask you the last question that we talked about in preparation for today, because I think this is the one sort of at the heart of what we're trying to get to, is what advice would you give to clients on how to measure success and adopt a more continuous improvement mindset, which you've talked about and I've touched on as well during the presentation? Yeah,

well, it has nothing to do with technology. So I suggest a good way to start, if you don't already do it, because I know a lot of companies do this, is you have a monthly post-close all -hands review to identify what went well, what didn't. You know, start by having department leaders make a commitment to continuous improvement. You know, we've always done it that way. No, those are the six most expensive words in running a finance organization.

And maybe to support this, you have a checklist with a standard set of items. Now, again, you already might be doing this, that you monitor and grade. Celebrate the things that have improved. Anything that didn't go well, well, identify what can be done this month to prevent that from happening again. I think overall it's important to keep a positive tone and focus on improvement, continuous improvement, how to resolve issues rather than making it a blame game.

Keep the meeting as short as possible. You know, we spend too much time in meetings. And if you're doing it virtually, if it's on Teams or Zoom or whatever, everybody has to have their camera on.

And then there's always going to be non-standard issues that arise. And in those cases, the point is find ways to prevent them from happening again. What's the root cause? Let's deal with that. Or if possible, you know, what is it that we ought to be monitoring over the course of weeks or months so that we get an early warning that something's brewing that we need to be keeping our eye on to try to prevent?

All right. Thank you, Rob. Over the course of the webinar, we've tried to address as many questions that have come in in the Q&A. And Rob, there's a number of questions that have come in that I thought would be good for us to try to address. Let's see. Here's one. How can organizations transition from a traditional period and close to a more continuous or automated process?

Well, you know, the first question you should ask, and it's like that old joke about psychiatry. Does the department really sincerely want to change?

We've always done it that way is a real problem. So without leadership, without trust in that leadership, without clear objectives and the belief that a new way is actually better, I wouldn't be – I don't think a lot's going to change. But if you do have leadership and they want to have change, then that's a start. That's an important start.

I think a second step is inventorying every spreadsheet that you use in the process and figure out how to eliminate it.

You know, spreadsheets are an essential tool for accountants. I've used them for over 40 years. But they have to be replaced wherever possible in the close because they create risks. And with that, they create the need for checks to ensure that, gee, everything's accurate, that those numbers are actually what the numbers were further up in the process. And all of that just slows things down and takes up time.

And I think a third step is having the technology necessary to support a far less manual approach, one that delivers automation with human in the loop, automation that enables you to get the results you want with all the same reliability that you need, but with a whole lot less manual effort. All right. And here's one more, Rob, that I'm going to ask you. This is a question on AI. What are the biggest challenges that finance teams face with adopting AI and automation in the record-to-report process?

Well, of course, you know, every company is different. But if I had to generalize from the biggest issue to the almost biggest issue, I really think that most are going to find that it's in this order, people, process, data, and technology. And I'll just repeat myself. Change management is tough and requires good management and leadership to get people behind the shift, making sure you continuously assess all of your close-to-report processes on an ongoing basis to take advantage of technologies that can streamline tasks and make people more productive.

The third part on data is paying attention to data management and stewardship because, you know, data is the foundation of accounting quality.

And fourth and finally, technology is probably the easiest part, but you have to know what software best meets your needs. And having spent many decades, you know, assessing technology, I'll tell you, it isn't simple, but it is certainly something that's manageable.

I guess I'll take one myself here before we wrap up. How does OneStream help streamline closed consolidation and reconciliation compared to multiple-point solutions? Well, I'm going to draw on some of the things that you just said, Rob. First, it's unified.

Consolidations, account reconciliation, transaction matching, journal entries are all unified in the same platform with the same data. So unification is one. Second, Rob just touched on it yet again, was good data quality. Well, we have a single point of integration into that one platform that provides a rich set of capabilities and connectors that allow you to get to the source systems, manage the data quality on the way in. And then all of that data is immediately accessible throughout the closed process without moving data back and forth between applications.

So it's really about unification. It's about integrated data quality and management. And then it's having the rich set of capabilities that we've talked about as part of the webinar, from being able to manage simple to even complex global consolidations, transaction matching, account reconciliations,

and journal entry management. It's all in the same place. So you don't have the swivel of the chair to multiple applications. You don't have the data gymnastics to move them back and forth, all of which creates risk in the process. So from a OneStreet perspective, it really comes down to unifying all of those in one place with good data quality control and auditability and automation throughout the entire process.

I'm looking at the time, and we're coming up near the end. So if we did not get to your questions over the course of the presentation, we will follow up afterwards. And one of the questions that always comes up and has come up in this webinar as well, many of you have asked if you'll get the recording of this webinar afterwards, and the answer is yes.

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Thanks. So, Rob, I really appreciate, I think we talked about in the beginning, we've been working together for, what, 30-plus years now, and we haven't, I don't think that we've done a webinar before, so I'm really, I've really enjoyed working with you today. So thanks again for your time, and also thanks for your insight that you shared in the audience today. And thanks to everyone that's attended, and we'll see you on the next webinar.