Modern close - Innovation spotlight series

Hello and thank you for joining us today. Finance has long been defined by the close, but the expectations around speed, accuracy and insight have changed dramatically. That's why today in our innovation spotlight series we're focusing on what a modern financial close really looks like with OneStream. I'm Nick Cox, product expert with OneStream and I'm joined by my colleague Jeremy Gutman who's our EVP of product and engineering. He'll be speaking a little bit after me.

I just need to mention something very important which is a forward-looking statement disclaimer. We may well be making some forward-looking statements today and as is customary these are subject to risks and uncertainties just to ensure that you're aware not to take decisions based on what we're mentioning.

So I'd like to start off with a little bit of research that we've done. So we do study the role of finance and how it's evolving and we've done a piece of research called the Finance 2035 and the takeaway is clear. Finance is being pushed to operate very differently across our research leaders. We're telling us that they need more unified trusted data. They're under pressure to invest in AI and infrastructure and they see automation reshaping the function. That's why we describe this shift as moving from reporter to strategic integrator.

We need to embrace automation and drive towards a more continuous process or more continuous processes especially around the close.

And our research tells us that currently 81% of organizations still struggle to close the books in less than five days. What we see is a need to move from this monthly quarterly mindset towards a daily weekly mindset. We need to shift from a concentrated end of period scramble towards a more continuous daily process. Now all of this requires an operating system to take finance forward. So I'd like to just take you through the OneStream platform and how it supports organizations.

Now importantly we did the hard work right at the beginning. You don't need to figure out how to stitch systems together. You don't need to wrangle disconnected analytics, AI, planning and reporting tools.

And you don't need to risk audit exposure or compromise your agility. We've already solved that. We've brought it all together. Not just technically but intelligently. One core finance to unify closed planning reporting and compliance. One operational analytics pillar to align fast moving operational data with finance. And one AI foundation to forecast, detect risks and surface insights. Detect risks and surface insights. All in one place.

This isn't a bundle. It's a purpose built engine for modern finance. That's uniquely unified, infinitely extensible and AI powered. And all in one single platform. And importantly now accessible through the OneStream agentic layer by the AI agents that you use. Such as Claude, ChatGPT, CoPilot.

Now let's talk about how the OneStream platform brings our vision of forward finance to life. And forward finance is powered by the three pillars of OneStream. We're concentrating in this webinar today on the first pillar, core finance. It's really the foundation for finance to do the things you must do. And the heart of our reliable data. Faster, more efficient and more efficient than ever before.

We are very proud of the fact that we are now a four times leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for financial close and consolidation. This really validates the OneStream vision and our execution. And we were cited for how we unify all financial data for the accuracy, efficiency and automation that we bring. And really cited as the leader due to our completeness of vision. We aim to continue to deliver on that vision, bringing faster time to close, confidence in the numbers and an AI platform that drives transformation.

And this really sets the vision for the modern financial close, which Jeremy will now talk in more detail to.

Jeremy Willis, Ph.D.: Yeah, thanks, Nick. I like where you just hit on the vision and it's a shared vision that we've been working with our customers, you know, to continue to develop.

And that vision is how we think about driving and powering the complete modern financial close. Jeremy Willis, Ph.D.: And so what that means to us when we think about it, it means unifying all of your data, automating the repetitive tasks within the close, de-risking it so you can have a truly automated end-to-end process. Right. So from the very first transaction creation all the way through to financial reporting. You've got it unified with your workflow and with your AI insights all in a single pane of glass.

Jeremy Willis, Ph.D.: That's what your customers have been asking for and that's what we've been focused on.

And together, we've really done some amazing work and have released some amazing solutions that are helping you power the complete modern close today. And so if I just kind of jump into a couple of the highlights over the past year. First, we brought anomaly detection, AI-driven anomaly detection to our account reconciliation process. Right. So this is really enabling you to do more quickly. Right. To detect and resolve those anomalies.

Next, we focused on transaction matching. And we expanded our capabilities to now support up to 200 million transactions per period. And that's really important. Why? Well, it's a great milestone for the solution. But it's more importantly, what our customers have been asking for as they have the ability to go deeper into these transactional systems so that they can be more effective in their matching exercise. They were looking for us to continue to scale. And that's exactly what we did. And we've had great feedback from our early customers that we partner with to develop this capability.

And then towards the end of last year, I'm really excited about the release of Journal Entry Manager.

Journals You Manager helps you centralize, streamline and automate your journal process. All right. So that's your journal creation, your validation and your posting back to your source systems.

It really helps you eliminate a lot of what are manual tasks today and really overhead that you have to deal with every time you look to run through your close process. So these are three areas and solutions that we've been investing. And we've really seen great evolution and most importantly, adoption from the OneStream ecosystem. So rather than just hear me talk about it, why don't we take a look and see Modern Financial Close in action?

The Modern Financial Close allows organizations to shift from a concentrated end of period scramble towards a more continuous daily process. This Genesis-based unified control center provides real-time visibility into Modern Financial Close processes in a single centralized platform. A modern task list transforms from a static to -do checklist into a dynamic execution engine.

It is no longer just a record of what was done, but an active driver of the entire financial close process.

OneStream's high-volume transaction matching solution transforms a manual labor-intensive process into a strategic engine that accelerates your financial close and eliminates month-end bottlenecks.

By automating up to 95% of routine matches, your team can shift their focus from manual data entry to high-value exception management and analysis. This real-time visibility ensures you maintain a continuous cycle posture, providing leadership with accurate, data-driven insights whenever they are needed. Our latest Journal Entry Manager solution centralizes your data, replacing manual spreadsheets, dynamic workflows, ensure a single source of truth for every entity.

By pre-validating data, organizations ensure that only clean, accurate data ever reaches their ERPs, transforming the journal process into a strategic, audit-ready operation. Journal Entry Manager is designed to empower our customers with easy deployment and maintenance, giving finance teams full autonomy to configure workflows and templates without relying on heavy IT support or outside consultants.

AI-powered account reconciliations unify your financial reporting and close processes by loading your trial balance, once both finance and accounting work from the same data, ensuring alignment and streamlining the close. With built-in anomaly detection powered by Sensible AI Studio, OneStream can automatically surface exceptions using pre-configured rules, like spotting documentation gaps or unusual balance changes. This lets teams focus on managing risk and resolving the issues faster, and improving transparency, control, and productivity.

OneStream provides the ability to drill down from balance sheet totals to underlying reconciliations, providing a single line of sight across the entire data value chain. This capability transforms a static financial report into a transparent, audible process that ensures every dollar on the balance sheet reflects actual business activity.

Embedded AI routines from Sensible AI Studio power an intelligent and automated narrative analysis. A narrative analysis transforms a standard financial table into a strategic tool by explaining the why behind the numbers. While a numeric report may show a large loss in accounts receivable, a narrative report provides the essential context, such as improved collection efforts to help leaders make informed decisions rather than reactive cuts.

How do you see that? Wow, that's great. I think as you can see, you know, these solutions are really coming to life and coming, you know, to demonstrate the value that they provide, right? And you see that one, having one unified platform to bring all this together gives you that accurate trust and insight into the data, right? So you can perform the tasks that you have to within the close.

And you see here visually, right? It's bringing all of this together in one central place so you can manage that close process from end to end.

And honestly, we're still getting started here. There's so much more we want to do and so much more we want to bring to the close process to help you guys do more and do it faster. So you can expect to see more investment and more solutions coming out in this space as we continue to build out the end to end. And honestly, the features and functionalities you see here, like we know this is why customers and prospects are choosing OneStream and choosing to use OneStream for their modern financial close process.

So obviously, we talked about the product. You saw the product. Nick, I think it'd be great if we could talk about a customer example.

Great. Thank you, Jeremy. Yeah. And a great example is Fairstone. And so Fairstone spoke recently at our Splash conference. And just a little bit about Fairstone Financial. They are a Canadian bank. They are offering financial solutions such as personal loans, mortgages, other loans, retail financing, term deposits, credit cards, mainly to Canadian individual customers.

They are the sixth or seventh largest bank in Canada, depending on how you measure it. And over the past 10 years, they've experienced significant growth, both organically and through acquisitions. Now, before OneStream, Fairstone was using a standalone transaction matching and reconciliation tool, which they had rolled out in 2018.

And some years later, they got a notice from the vendor that the tool would be going out of support. And they were welcome to migrate onto the new platform. But at that moment in time, there were some significant events happening. They were emerging. They were actually acquiring another financial institution, another bank. And so this gave them some time for reflection. And I really liked the analogy they used when they spoke at our event, which was very much on the basis of this. They said they knew they were going to build a big house. And so they wanted to build strong foundations.

And even though the first phase of the house building was just one floor, they wanted to ensure that when they built the foundations, they would be strong enough to support a bigger house in the future. So really, that analogy really resonated in the way that we see OneStream as being a solid foundation and something you can really build on.

And Fairstone took a step back. They selected a solution that will cover all of their needs, including transaction matching and beyond. They selected OneStream for account reconciliations, transaction matching, as I said, journal entry manager, consolidations and reporting.

So I think you'd agree, Jeremy, this is a great story for OneStream and the modern financial close.

It is. I mean, I love the opportunity to hear Fairstone speak, certainly to hear the story from them.

And I had similar takeaways. And I think the kind of knowledge and insight that they were looking for a platform for a growth, I think one is insightful. And two, you know, love that they saw that vision and growth with OneStream.

And, you know, some of the things that I've heard from many others that resonated with me was the challenges they had around managing multiple ERPs and how they were looking for their journal entry process to really help eliminate the manual tasks and the coordination across those ERPs. And it's exactly why we built a journal entry manager. Like that was one of the key use cases we were targeting.

So great to hear the feedback of now someone that has selected and implemented it and is getting that value.

Nick, you know, I know you were closer and kind of had more time to talk with Fairstone one on one. I'm kind of curious. Can you tell us maybe a little bit more about why the OneStream journal entry manager made such a difference to Fairstone? Sure.

Yeah. So it's true. You know, they kind of mentioned it on the slide and they kind of had a killer moment with journal entry manager to them. But they built a pretty unique and powerful use case with it. Well, a number of them, actually. But I mentioned one which was around transaction matching where they use journal entry manager uniquely for booking of unreconciled items where the offset is in another match set. And so with the help of reason codes, reconcilers are able to identify unreconciled lines in one match set.

And then OneStream generates the account entry and sends it back to the ERPs. And the following day, those entries flow back automatically to transaction matching.

And with match rules, they get auto matched. And so that sounds kind of technical in a way, but it's all a huge time saving for the team. So they were they were incredibly excited about how how fast this makes the process for them, how it is and how much of a difference it's made.

It's it's great to hear. You know, we we talk so much about product and feature, but it's interesting to hear like what it means and the difference it makes to them and to the individuals. And that actually is one of the questions, you know, obviously, I'm the product and engineering person. I always want to talk about products, but these products impact people.

I'm kind of curious, again, to leverage your kind of your knowledge with the Fairstone team. Can you maybe shed some light on how it affects them as a team? What kind of like changes in the team or the morale? Do they see maybe kind of how does it impact some of the leadership? What do they see? Sure. Yeah.

No, great, great question, because they well know that the Fairstone team well know the challenges of older technology and manual processes around them. And actually, prior to OneStream, one of the team actually resigned over the process they had, the manual process and not liking it.

The people in the reconciliation team love OneStream. They used to have to identify everything manually, extract it, extract it to Excel, upload journal entries into both Workday and SAP and have them manually approved and attach backups and all sorts. There was a whole range of things that they mentioned. Now, with a click of a button, OneStream journal entry manager, the logic does the debits and credits and sends it back to the ERP. You know, as I similar to what I mentioned before, it's really it's really a huge time saver and a morale booster for the team.

And then just just adding on to sort of the leadership that there's one actually story that they told about the controller on the month two after the close of the second month using OneStream.

There was a person in the finance team that asked, you know, there was just a few hours to go to everything was finalized. And someone asked, can I book just one last entry in the SAP in the ledger? And, you know, they let that go through. And this would have generally taken a long time and a lot of additional effort at the end of that period. But once the entry was posted, someone in OneStream just did three steps, import, validate, load. And then the reports were all updated across the board in OneStream.

Huge time savings again by eliminating those manual extractions and uploads that they were used to in the past. It's great. OK, so I think, you know, great.

Me too. I think, you know, it is a great a great story and one of many that that we, you know, we could tell here. But, you know, great, a great example for us with modern financial close. So I would like to just, you know, open up to questions. I know I've seen a few questions being posted, which is great. Thank you for those as they've come in. So, Jeremy, I think there's a couple here that probably I could tune towards you. So there's one actually that nicely mentions AI. So it says you've not talked a lot about AI today. How should we think about AI around the modern financial close?

It's a great question. I mean, certainly AI as a specific topic was not our focus. But because we are a single platform, right, an AI native platform, our capabilities are available across all of our solutions and all of our capabilities.

So an example of that, you know, I talked about some of the enhancements we made to the account reconciliation process and that we can now automatically using AI detect and resolve anomalies. Like that's an example of exactly how we can leverage AI across all of our solutions. That algorithm is something part of something called Sensible AI Studio. And because, again, it's one platform, we're able to leverage that algorithm, bring it into modern financial close and use it to detect anomalies.

And so you'll see us continue to expand that because we are an AI native platform and all of the capabilities are available to all the solutions. Excellent.

Great. Thank you. Let's stay on the AI theme just for now. I like this question, actually. What if I'm not ready for AI just now and I'm too focused on getting consolidations stood up?

No, it's a great question. And you might not be ready, but you're closer than you might think because consolidations is the hard part, right? Managing through close is a difficult process. And once you've got that data and the workflow set up and unified, things like automation is going to be much easier.

And as we leverage additional agents and co-pilots, all of that will layer in because of our AI native platform. So what I would say is focus on consolidations, focus on close, get those done. You'll have the trusted, audited, verifiable data, and you'll have the basis and the one stream platform to help move you forward in your AI journey. Perfect.

Great. Thanks, Jeremy. So I think we'll just do one more question, which this one I think is great. Like Fairstone, I have multiple ERPs. How does this work with OneStream's Journal Entry Manager?

That's a great question. I mentioned a little bit when we were talking about Fairstone, but one of the key challenges we wanted to tackle with Journal Entry Manager is managing the journal orchestration across multiple ERPs. It doesn't have to be the same vendor, right? It can be different vendors, different ERPs. It's exactly what we designed Journal Entry Manager to do. You can set up templates that understand each ERP, understand the nuances because they're all different.

And all of that gets baked into the configuration and is available in the user experience when you're setting that up. Once it's set up, just like Fairstone found, import, validate, and load, and everything's automated.

Brilliant. Great. Thank you, Jeremy. Okay. Well, I'll just put the slide back up. So just focusing in on OneStream's forward finance, and this is actually a new operating model where AI doesn't replace finance. It amplifies it. And after benchmarking dozens of companies, we found that the most forward-looking are using AI to augment their workforce, optimize their operations, and transform their planning, forecasting, and decision-making. We've turned their best practices into an AI readiness framework and a blueprint that guides you past experimentation to finance AI at scale.

Now, before we wrap, I would just like to encourage you to look at the resources on your screen. You'll find everything you need to learn more about forward finance, the new operating model that I just mentioned for intelligent organizations. And be sure to check out also our Splash Experience Hub, where you can explore all the exciting new product innovations that we just announced across modern financial close and the other areas of the OneStream platform.

And then it's really just for me to say thank you. Thank you, Jeremy, for being here today and for your insights. Thank you to our attendees for joining us. And please do join us on our Innovation Spotlight Series webinars that are coming up. Thank you.