Demo: AI-Powered Financial Close

Hi everyone. We're going to give everyone just a quick second to get logged in and then we're going to get started. Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's demonstration of AI Powered Financial Close.

My name is Najla Brown and I will be your moderator for the presentation today. Before we get started, I would like to take a moment to go over a few housekeeping items. On the right hand side of your screen, you will see the Q&A tab.

If you have any questions during the webinar, please type them there anytime. These questions are sent directly to our speakers and myself and we will be addressing them at the end of the presentation.

You'll also see a Docs tab in that same side panel. I encourage you to click into that to find a direct link to our resource content, which you can explore or save for later. And now I'm excited to introduce our speakers today.

Nick Cox is a global product marketing leader at OneStream based in the EMEA region. With more than 25 years of experience spanning audit and accounting, finance and enterprise business software. He brings a deep passion for AI driven finance, combining market research, customer insight and emerging technology to shape how modern finance organizations operate and create value.

Derek Henry is a senior solutions consultant at OneStream based in the Dallas, Texas area. His career started as an auditor and then controller and similar roles. He then pivoted to solutions consulting where he has supported hundreds of evaluations of software and financial close management and beyond.

He's passionate about efficiency and accountability and leveraging software to enhance them throughout the business. And Nick, the mic is all yours. Great. Thank you very much. And thank you to everyone for joining.

So I'm going to start off just with a little bit of an overview of financial close. I'll hand over to Derek to do a demonstration today. We'll do a little bit of an intro to OneStream, maybe for those of you that don't know much about OneStream.

And then we will have some time for Q&A at the end. So if you do have a question, you can you can enter that in the in the questions capability there. And we'll try to get through some of those questions as many as we can.

So really, as a as an introduction and just to set the scene on financial close. Technology is is really driving an evolution of finance and accounting teams. And and I think it's important to also look at the evolution, that sort of evolution that's underway.

And finance teams are being asked to adapt and leverage technology more to streamline and modernize the close. And this is driving the need to evolve from core finance to digital finance and from just users of technology to producers with technology.

And the estimates are that digital finance talent roles will actually double from five to 10 percent in the next four to five years. To support this evolution, we see the need to foster our finance teams interest in technology and to apply that to streamline processes and free up capacity for more leadership, judgment and to help drive insights and strategy leadership in our organizations.

We really need to take on an athlete's mindset. It's kind of talking, thinking and acting differently about ourselves. And this is a view that was shared by our own research where we've done research with CFOs and 79 percent of those CFOs believe that finance employees need to update the way they see their jobs.

So if we have a look. The second area just want to look at is AI enabled technology and and applying continuous accounting to the close so that we are continuously recording, closing, reporting and being prepared to discuss financial results.

We can embrace and use AI to reduce manual tasks and automate as much as possible and then continuously monitor KPIs metrics and cash flow, ensuring early detection of issues and discrepancies. And in our survey, 77 percent of CFOs reported that a lack of technical skills within finance is the critical reason that their function has not yet adopted AI.

So we see this as really reinforcing the need for finance and accounting teams to evolve from core finance to digital finance. And then lastly, on this slide, I think currently we see and again from our research, we see that 81 percent of organizations are still struggling to close the books in less than five days.

And finance and accounting teams continue to operate in a monthly, quarterly mindset versus a daily, weekly mindset. So we see the need to shift from a concentrated end of period scramble towards a more continuous daily process.

So what is the case for a continuous modern financial close? And we we we we we all see this driving a case for this. This is really about shifting from a reactive period end close to this continuous, always ready model.

Now, on the why it reduces risks and bottlenecks. It improves speed and accuracy and gives finance real time visibility while freeing up teams to focus on insight, not not manual work. And on the how it's about automating repetitive tasks, spreading work across the period, fixing issues as they happen and connecting processes end to end with modern technology.

The bottom line really is a continuous close isn't just a faster close. It's a smarter, more strategic finance function. So what is the the modern financial close and how do we at OneStream see it? Well, we really define the modern financial close as a technology enabled continuous approach to period end accounting and finance.

That's continuous important word. Tasks are broken down and performed throughout the month rather than in a compressed close window. It's automated routine high volume tasks like reconciliations, matching, journal adjustments are automated, enabling you to focus on exceptions, anomalies, analysis and forecasting.

It's unified with OneStream. All close and consolidation activities are performed in a single platform, ensuring a seamless flow of data to streamline and shorten the close. Real time ongoing visibility into KPIs, cash flow and discrepancies.

And those discrepancies can be resolved as they occur. And then strategic accountants finance move from record keepers to value creators, supporting better planning, decision making and improving collaboration across departments.

And then finally, human centered by reducing the crunch time pressure, the modern close improves work life balance and team satisfaction. So, you know, I'd really say that you truly become strategic partners to the business.

So at that point, I would like to hand over to the very capable hands of Derek for the demonstration so you can see some of these points in action. So over to you, Derek. Awesome. Thank you, Nick. Let me just share my screen real quick here.

There we go. You seeing that? Okay, Nick? Yes. Perfect. Thanks, Derek. As I start, I'd like to share a quick joke. That's just kind of a tradition I have. Do you guys know why the accountant crossed the road? Because that's what they did last month.

You like that one, please feel free to share it with a friend. And we're going to help you understand how you can do things that are not necessarily the same as last year or last month way as we go through this.

So where we're starting here in OneStream, this is a dashboard of all the things around close. It's just an example of the kinds of views that you can use and configure in OneStream. This is relatively popular.

It's a reason when we kind of put together just based on the ways that you can take a look at the tasks that the team is doing. We'll touch on what those mean in a minute. The daily matching processes that are happening.

Any journal entries that you are making. And then finally, any reconciliations that the team is responsible for. So if you are an end user, you might have a view like this where you can touch on all the things you need to do for the day.

If you're more charged with leadership, you might have some that are a little bit more focused on risk and timeliness and how the team is doing and how the workload is balanced, et cetera. So you really can make it your own.

And just a little plug for some of the newer ways that we can leverage AI, you can detect anomalies. Now, right now, this is going to be looking at reconciliation. So if you looked at one like this right here and you saw some anomalies that said, hey, there's more items that are detailing the wreck than we usually have.

There we go. You can add a comment to say those are fine. There's different levels of severity. You can make sure that somebody has to respond to something before they sign off, et cetera. So there are a number of detectors that are going to help you understand what's going on and just kind of look at the history to say this is this little weird.

The sign is different than it has been. The number of items, the number of approvers, it's all different. Those are just things that are going to sit above and beyond the vast logic you can build into OneStream.

Now, to kind of start with this brief demonstration, we're going to look at account reconciliation. So even the navigation you're seeing on the left is configurable. If there are things that are not relevant to you or more relevant, maybe you want to move that up and down a little bit.

It's totally fine. Okay. So as we start to look at the reconciliations, we have a grid at the top here of all the different wrecks. You can have different filters for what role are you in. I'm in here as administrator just so I can show you a couple of things.

Filtered it for an account status, et cetera. Over the side, you have an overall view of how many, you know, wrecks are being done. Again, this is me as an admin. So global, there's a whole bunch of them, a few hundred.

It could be thousands. Or if you're an end user, it might just be a couple dozen or even less. Shows you the different statuses that those have. Now, if we look at a couple of reconciliations, we're going to kind of start from least automated to most as we go through and look at just a couple of these.

So this one, the idea is that you can add items at the bottom. Items are what are going to substantiate the reconciliation balance. We can give ourselves just a little bit more space and drag that up.

But this is where the things are going to live. This happens to be a bank account that we're taking a basic approach to. So there's a balance item right here that comes in automatically or you can have that load as a part of a big data load or whatever.

Off to the side, it's going to show you what's the balance of the account, what's been explained, what is yet to be explained, what's the change since the last time it was reconciled. And then where is it in the status? How many approvals are there going to be? So in this case, we're doing something really basic.

We're going to look at prior items, just assuming that maybe those are going to be reused. We can use one or all of them. We can copy them, which is going to reuse them, but we can still edit them as if they're similar, but not the exact same.

Polo is going to retain the aging. So that's normally what people want to do because we've got aging in place here. Notice the 150, 91, et cetera. We've explained everything. There's nothing left to explain so we could certify.

Now you can put a threshold in place if you want or even much more deep logic. So if we tried to prepare here, it's going to say, hey, we've got we need to have an attachment because we have a B item type for a balance like from the bank.

And we have we need to have comments added to items that are over 60 days old. That's a great example of the vast logic you can build into one stream, either a very granular approach like this one, or it could be global for everything that meets certain criteria.

No other closed solution that I've seen. And I've pretty much seen them all at this point can get that granular with the logic and it lets one stream become the traffic cop. So you don't have to. And as a previous controller, I had to do a lot of that manually.

And it's like stopping at a stop sign waiting for all the other people to facilitate traffic. It just makes a mess compared to a traffic light. And that's what we're seeing right here. So we would come in, we would add a comment right here like will clear in July.

Just going to copy that for the one right below it as well. Okay, so there we go. Once we save those off, it'll register that and then the only other thing we'd have to do is add a supporting document here for that particular balance type.

So we're just going to bring in a balance or a bank statement right there. So upload that. That's going to be documented over here. So any supporting files, it could be Excel or PDF or something else.

You'd be good to go. And those are now done. We can have a certification statement right here. So if you wanted to see the different language that's going to be shown up, this is a templated approach that you can apply.

Most people don't click on that after they're done. You can add more language if you want. And then you sign off and that can trigger alerts to people if you want. I would recommend not doing that too much because you'll get a lot of alerts maybe distracting.

But now it's prepared and ready for that approver. So very basic approach. You can enter items, just add them, pull them from previous periods, and then you're good to go. Next one we're going to look at here is a little bit more automated where we're going to leverage Excel.

So in this case, we have nothing here. We've got a $332,000 balance. By the way, you can add commentary to the rec level, not just the item level. If you wanted to see different attributes, you could do that as well.

You saw the anomalies when we looked at that from the very beginning. So just kind of help you understand what some of those boxes look like. Now, when we talk about templates in OneStream, we used an Excel-based template approach because what gives you more flexibility than Excel? Okay? So the idea is that you can keep those detailed calculations or support in Excel and then pull out key details and store them in OneStream like we're going to do right here.

So if you have good templates or a structure file that you really like, make that a template in OneStream. Assign it to the different accounts that it should be used for. Maybe it's a general template.

Maybe it has some, you know, amortization that you're doing or whatever. You could store that as a template. And when a team clicks that button, it's going to launch that kind of blank template ready for them to go.

In our case, we've already got one where we filled it in. So we're going to pull this one in. Okay? The structure of this template is totally up to you. What you're going to do to make it power what you're about to see as these load in OneStream is tag a couple of items to know where the amount comes from, where the type and the name that you want to cite, and then the transaction date, which drives the aging.

So with importing from Excel, we have all the different items here. There's eight of them. They support that balance. That file is attached as support, and we can move on. And this is important because it shows how OneStream plays really nicely with Excel.

And by the way, it goes way beyond this, especially outside of the closed area. But it gives you an option as you try to drive adoption early on in your OneStream journey to get those Excel files and get the key details like the kind of categorical types safely here in OneStream.

And those can be reported on. They can be a part of dashboards. You can put charts around them. And you have key items like aging. A lot of people really don't look at aging as such a key item, but it absolutely is.

But you have the ability to get the best of both Excel and OneStream. Okay? So that's kind of in the middle in terms of automation. So we could certify that one and move on as well. Now, another approach, if we move on into one that has, let me find the one that's got our, there we go.

This one right here. So it's a great example of how we can start to bring in even more automation. So let's say you've got accounts receivable like this. You've got several different sub-ledgers outside of OneStream.

You've got a couple of different GLs. Could be one or could be many of both of those. In this case, we have several currencies in play. So we have what is the chart of accounts denominated in? What are the items going to be denominated in? What are we reporting in? Those can all be different.

This one's completely auto-certified for the preparer and the approver because data has flowed in. It's compared to that GL and everything is good. Okay? We do that with a B item type, kind of like that bank statement we started with.

So everything is good here. Once you set that logic up, there's nothing else the team has to do. Okay? And if you needed to see the different child accounts that are in that REC, it's going to show those to you as well.

Now, what I want you to understand with what we can do in OneStream is get these items in place here. So this is the key to a reconciliation is items at the bottom there. Those can be manually added. They can be quickly imported from Excel.

Or in this case, they're just showing up based on logic. Well, what then? Okay, the tie out happens, but what about the health of the account? And this is a huge differentiator for OneStream. So we can go over into a workspace.

This one happens to be segregated between the US and Canada, but it doesn't work. It doesn't have to be. And what you'll see here is we have so much more than just the REC balance. Okay? We're able to break down at the invoice level.

Here's account one. Here's account two and three of the seven or eight that are attached to this REC. We're looking at this, all these invoices broken down from an aging perspective by account, or it could be by customer by amount, by customer by invoices.

The detail at the bottom there, if you wanted to sort that based on the age of the invoice. Or maybe even come over and have a full screen view where you're adding some commentary. If AR is important to you, you probably want to be tracking that collection process and saying, well, all the ones over, you know, 200 or close to it.

Maybe we're going to add a comment to show that we're actually doing something about that. Driving down the day sales outstanding that represents the AR balance. So the point of this example is to help you understand that there's so much more we can do going beyond the tie out nature of a REC process.

Now, another example of where we are very automated here is where we can introduce transaction matching. Okay, so what's happening in this case is data is flowing in from data sources like the bank, the GL, some enhancements might be made, some cleanups, some extracting a piece of a long description, any of that kind of stuff you might see in an ETL or extract transform load tool.

We can do that in one stream. So once that is happening, and that's normally on a daily process, the matching rules will run. So does the amount match? Does the date match? Do items in other fields match like an identifier or a document number or whatever? Whatever data source and data fields you have can be used for this.

That's going to happen overnight. So what you're left with on a daily basis is to manage by exception. So if you see an oopsie on day one, you can address it within the next couple of days rather than wait till the end of the month.

So as Nick said earlier, continuous accounting, this is a great example of that. So that's happening as frequently as you want. Maybe you check those things every day or once a week. At any case, you're able to do it more than just at the end of the month.

And then when it is the end of the month, you know, with an account like this, this is a ZBA account. So it should be zero at the bank. Our GL here says that it is 33,000. Well, that's just because we have these 36 checks down here that haven't had a chance to clear yet.

So this REC is completely automated. So you've got the auto prep and auto approval there because everything is working as intended. And that logic has been built into one stream. So matching is really helpful for things like this goes well beyond the bank.

That just happens to be the most common example we see. It could be intercompany or a clearing account or an accrual where you have a credit, then a debit or vice versa or something like that. This is super powerful.

And it's designed to be owned by the finance and accounting team. IT normally just kind of helps with that data plumbing so we can get to and from the different places that you need to use it. Now, one more thing I'll kind of show you.

Actually, let's do two more. I think we have time for two more. So if we wanted to do an Excel approach like a prepaid account, you know, today, this is something where you can use Excel to pull it in.

Notice these are a little different. The REC item type is S because it's not just items. There is detail behind those items. There's an amortization stream behind them. So if that lives in your Excel file, maybe it's one different item per sheet, like a different invoice, or maybe they're all on a big list.

Either approach can work. We're just going to tag where those data points are. And so this month you'll see a guy like this, right, is 3,086. Next month it may be 3,200 or whatever that math is on, say, 12 months or whatever.

But this one can auto certify as well because it's S types. It's in a prepaid account. You might put some very specific logic on how you want that to auto certify. So if nothing changes, no new items next month, you wouldn't have to touch this REC if you didn't want to.

Now how that works is based on auto REC rules. Okay. A key differentiator for OneStream is you can build your own rules. So we'll suggest them to you. Some of the basics like other tools will have like, hey, there was no change to it.

Or maybe there's no change and it's a medium or high risk account. Right. So whatever the case is, you can build that in even specifying the different item types. Well, let's only auto certify if it's a B type or a generic item or schedule, or maybe it's a matching type.

Right. So there's different ways that you can do that. You can also bring in an expression. And here's where you can make an auto certification will be pretty much whatever you want. Any data point that is used in the REC process.

And notice there are dozens of them available can be referenced in that expression, just like an if statement in an Excel file. So here we're saying, okay, zero balance or activity. The risk level needs to be 20 or 30 or the unexplained balance needs to be within a dollar or whatever makes sense.

Just as an example here, if you wanted to have a new entity that was acquired or being spun up or a new group or whatever, that maybe they should not have certify everything until they've proven that they've got good quality in place.

You might put that as a part of a rule here. So a lot that you can do, you can also automate the maintenance of account reconciliations. So let's say that we wanted to automate the risk factor. You know, and that might be driving some of that automation.

You can come in here and say for accounts that are this account, this entity, balance over this and this and have whatever criteria you want. Okay. Then you can come in here and say here are all the attributes that we want to set there.

It could be that we're setting who's responsible in terms of a group. It could be that it's more risk related or how many approvers or whatever. And then the cool thing about how this works in one string is it's going to give you the ability to see which accounts would that affect.

Right. So we're really trying to make the logic robust, make it tight and make it seamless on your team to be able to power your recs. Okay. So keep it basic. Use Excel and it makes where it makes sense.

Build an automation all over the place. It's really up to you and how you do that. And if you wanted to see more of a view of where are we at, kind of more of a dashboard view, you can configure whatever kind of specific, rec related dashboards that you want.

So maybe it's prep status, maybe it's approval status. It's kind of due dates. Where are we at from an entity perspective or maybe even bring risk into the play. Whatever makes sense for you. Now, as we go back over to our dashboard, we started with case we looked at Rex.

Well, what about task management? It's another thing that people definitely want to track. They think, you know, here's our closed checklist. How can we kind of use that as something that we're tracking? In fact, let's go back up to the start with the dashboards very similar to the Rex.

It might be very similar to those. It might be different where you're trying to understand, you know, which ones are past due or what's our timeliness trend, etc. Maybe it's more of a Gantt view that you're looking for.

This is going to show you how things just kind of overlay in terms of the schedule. It could be that you want to see dependencies in place, etc. Any of these can be displayed. Let's say that we want to look at one of these to see the details.

So down below, you would see a description of it to goes goes along with the kind of label that to it. Who's assigned? What action is it going to take? What is the history to it? Attach a comment or or some kind of supporting document.

What's different about this in one stream is that tasks can be executed directly in the platform. And if you have tasks happening outside of them, which everybody does, let's say you're closing down AP in an ERP.

If that is exposable via API or some other way, one stream can read that and automatically mark it off from within task manager. So you don't have to touch it. And speaking from somebody who used to be very guilty of doing the thing, but forgetting to update it within the manager like this.

I think that is awesome because it keeps everything real time in terms of where we met. You can even have tasks marked off directly in Excel, kind of connect that to one of these if you're doing some variance analysis or or booking a journal through Excel that way.

You can have it mark off the task manager directly from Excel to me pretty darn powerful. And if you just wanted to see everything in the grid, the idea here is this goes well beyond your closed checklist.

So you can have groups of budget. Maybe it's connected to the record matching process. Maybe we're going to organize it geographically or whatever really makes sense. So managing your checklist of reporting and journals and controls you're performing.

Those are really good use cases. One that was super impactful to me was taking the auditors checklist and throwing it here within task manager. So then you can see all the different things. Maybe you filter on that audit checklist group or category.

You can do those things well before the auditors come out to do their fieldwork. So being proactive and I think Nick mentioned that a little bit earlier is a huge approach that's going to save you a lot of time.

And instead of doing everything after the fact, you're spreading that load throughout the period, throughout the year, throughout the quarter of the months, whatever that might be. And that's how you do continuous accounting a little bit at a time.

You know where there are issues and you can manage them proactively. Now, within tasks, you might have some journal entries. OK, so you saw journals from within the dashboard we started from. This is a relatively new part of the modern financial close within OneStream.

This gives you the ability to record journals in OneStream. It can push those out into your ERPs. It doesn't have to, but that's the idea. And then those ERPs process them and send them back into OneStream.

So you're kind of seeing that here. We have different ERPs like SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, PeopleSoft. When one has been processed, you'll see that ERP ID right there. And if we scroll just a little bit to the side, maybe you want to take some of those columns out.

That's totally fine. What is the approval status? How many approvals do you want in there? Is it just in process? Is it prepared? Does it even need an approval? And then what's that posting status? So many of these are posted and that's why you would see the posting ID over here.

OK. Now, if we look at one of these, if you wanted to see what's in the current period, or if you want to see several periods together, et cetera, it's up to you on how you want to kind of look at the view.

The idea is to bring all the journals into one place that are manually done, not completely system fed, like from a billing system, a sub ledger or a point of sale. The things that the team impacts that are manual.

These can be imported from Excel. They can be mainly put in here or you can copy one from a previous period. So if we were to look at one like the sales one here, we could copy that or even reverse it directly within one stream.

And given how many things are repetitive, copying is huge. Right. So if we look at one of these just to kind of understand what's happening here and what the value is. You would configure and that's normally the finance and accounting team.

Again, IT within one stream is generally there for plumbing and maybe some really advanced kind of integration stuff. But the finance and accounting team come in here and say, here's kind of some general stuff, the ERP, the posting period, all that.

Here's the header information, which can be different for different systems as well as the line item fields. Those also can be different for different systems. OK, so this is either entered or it is imported from Excel or it's copied or it can be the result of the matching process or reconciliation.

Let's say like a prepaid. You want to amortize that or there's something that flows in from a system like the bank and you haven't recorded it because that's your source of data for that, like a fee or interest you've earned or transfer or something that can be connected to the journal process.

You want to add attachments like Excel or PDF. You can. You want to add comments. You can. All that is a part of the solution here with journals. Now, the way that we do this is different from other solutions I've seen that are very similar.

This is very templated. So when you set up a template, it's going to be connected to an ERP and that's where you decide what data is captured. General data at the header level at the line level and then what field lists are used.

So a list of accounts that can be every account that you want access to or some people are using templates to be very specific. And that template really is only used for one type of journal entry. Use as many or as few as you want to accomplish that.

So the idea here is to get everything in one place, have that one view of where journals are at so you can understand where there might be issues or where there's completeness. A journal can then automatically mark off a task on the task manager checklist.

Pretty awesome there. You also have automation capability. And then the idea is to send these all back into the ERP and then ERP reports back with the status. So if you have a lot of systems that you're managing, think about having to cross train the team on all those different systems.

You don't have to do that anymore. You can use one system right here, just like one stream. So what did we see today? We saw several ways that you can streamline the close, have a pulse on everything that's going on in real time and layer in plenty of automation.

So when we talk about what's different in one stream, people often ask me, hey, you use a lot of these systems. What would you say is different? Right. Well, there's table stakes stuff when it comes to a close management solution.

You got to track stuff. You got to talk to other systems and import data. There's got to be some controls and workflows. You know who owns it and drive accountability and things have to be organized. You saw several instances of these things.

There are tools out there that do these pretty darn well. What makes one stream really unique is that everything is one place going well beyond the close. We can do bespoke reporting well beyond just kind of here's the account balances and group those in a status.

We can do full financial packages. We can play with a two way interface with Excel instantly update a PowerPoint or a Word document. You've got consolidations. You've got operational reporting. You've got all kinds of planning we can do in one stream.

That's pretty unique. We can also tailor dashboards and reports much more than the canned ones you tend to see in other systems. You saw several elements of logic. You can configure those warnings that prevent you from certifying a wreck.

Right. Like the basically letting one stream be the traffic cop. You can put in your own auto certification rules, the matching rules, those dynamic attribute mapping of setting things like risk automatically.

And it can go much, much deeper. You can think of the logic. We can probably build it in one stream. And then most importantly, with all this automation, you can go beyond a tile. That's why I like to make that one green there.

So if you remember that example, we went over the dashboard, saw that we had some things that were aged that maybe we didn't know about. That's the example of that. Account reconcilations are no longer just a tie out exercise.

We can do more, be analytical and provide so much more value to the business. So there's your quick look at one stream. We'd love to help you understand more. So please reach out to us, your account rep.

And we'd love to have a more deep discussion on how we can help you understand how one stream is going to really take your clothes to the modern level. And with that, I'm going to turn over my friend Nick to close us out for today.

Great. Thank you, Derek. That was excellent. Yeah. So I'll just put the slides back up. And it was really nice lead into a little overview of one stream. So those of you maybe that don't know much about one stream overall, I'd like to just give a quick introduction.

Really, I'd say, you know, let's face it. Finance is being asked to do more than ever. Faster closes, smarter planning, real time insights. And yet many teams are still juggling disconnected tools, silo data and manual workarounds.

That's where one stream really comes in. Our vision is bold, but simple to be the operating system for modern finance. Let's really quickly dive into what that means. And, you know, I think really it's important to say 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, reporting tools. Hopefully you saw that from from Derek's demo. You don't need to risk audit exposure or compromise your agility.

We've already solved that. We brought it all together, not just technically, but intelligently. And so we have one core finance to unify close. So the full financial close that you were just seeing, planning, reporting and compliance.

One operational analytics pillar to align fast moving operational data with finance. And then one A.I. foundation to forecast, 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 A.I.

powered. And again, all in one single platform. So with that, I would like to open for questions. I've been monitoring the questions. We've had a few come in to really appreciate that. Thank you for those.

Derek. So I'm going to I'm going to ask you the first one here about account reconciliation templates. How do the templates work in one stream? Good question there. So we take a unique approach. Right.

I've seen some where the template is kind of baked into the solution. We may get to that point at some someday. I feel like there might be a good good reason to do that as well as the approach we take with just using Excel.

I'm an Excel nut. I built out some really cool things. And if you haven't used some of the newer Excel features like dynamic array functions, power query and many others, I would encourage you to kind of look into some of those things.

So once you have an Excel file that you really like, we define that as a template. Now, I would probably blank out a lot of the stuff and have it ready for data so it could be used by a lot of different account types, maybe.

And then we assign that as a template within one stream. So if you think about having like a prepaid is a great example of that, you might have several different type of prepaid accounts. So you'll build in some of the calculations there, capture data points like the start date, end date amount, etc.

Those will be in an Excel file. And then within one stream, when you're saying here are all the accounts, I want to assign this template to those five or 10 or 20 or however many accounts. And that's how we do it.

So you can have one template. You can have hundreds of them. The sweet spot tends to be 10 to 12, 10 to 20 or so. Excellent. Thank you, Derek. Okay. A question here around quite a good one. I think, you know, when we if we look to compare one stream with point solutions out there that deal with the financial close and account reconciliations, how would you how would you compare? So that's why I like to end with the slide that I did there just after the demo.

So we do the table stake stuff really well. You know, there's tracking the workflow. There's visibility into where the status is. There's the organization, which I think is way underrated, just knowing where to go to find things very quickly.

If you've ever had a traverse a network folder structure, it can be a huge massive of of, you know, 30 minutes later. Like, what was I doing again? I've been been in that situation many times. We take it further.

So one stream is designed to be a unified platform where if that trial balance comes in from one or more ERPs, we're able to use it for consolidations, for reporting, for planning, as well as reconciliations.

So when you think about the technical debt that goes away, that's a term that before I joined one stream, I'd heard in different ways. But I love that phrase because the more time it takes to massage data and to assign security and just to manage the process that is significantly reduced by having one solution where all these different things touch it.

That's by far the biggest one. But another one to me, I ended with that go beyond the tile. I think that's huge because accountants are smart people. They're just they tend to be underutilized. Technology might be a blocker for them if it's not the right tech.

And then being able to build in so much logic. To me, that's huge because that's where the automation is. If you think about how to automate, it's just it's take the logic people are doing, put it where it makes sense into the software so that they can be freed up to manage by exception and really think critically instead of that, you know, that anybody little steps.

So I would think those are some of the bigger things and there's more more coming in the near future. So stay tuned. Excellent. Thank you, Derek. So this is a popular question because I see a couple of them.

But I know we get asked this quite often. How long does it take to implement modern financial close in one stream? Well, if I say it depends, that's where people want to throw stuff at me because they kind of expect that.

So, you know, in general, three to four months is very common. It does depend on how many systems you're connecting, how many accounts you're going to set up, how many templates you want to set up and all the metadata that goes around that.

So you can kind of imagine there is kind of a scalable kind of a chart graph to that level of complexity. But we have the ability to leverage kind of a pre packaged approach to it. We call that CPM express.

So it leverages some things to get you up and running quickly based on just common parameters. You are not stuck with those parameters. If something changes, you can always re reconfigure the solution, maybe have effective dating if it makes sense.

The other thing I'll say is if you're already using one stream for consolidations, which is quite common, right, we can then leverage a lot of the works done because you already have data flowing in. We just tap into that to set up the right process, make sure there are the right security groups in place to do the recs, assign frequencies and things like that.

So we can run fast with you. We can take a slow process. This is often a phase like one B right behind consolidations or planning or whatever people start with. And a lot of people are starting with recs because it's a big, it's a big, you know, controls compliance is important.

Perfect. Thank you, Derek. I think we've got one, just one more question. I like this one, which is how much help do we need from IT to set up one stream? So I mentioned this a couple of times during a demo.

IT is generally with the data plumbing and integrations, right? So the team has the ability if you want them to, you don't have to. If you have people that, you know, they pick up technology quickly and they understand the logic and, you know, they're willing to put in the rules and logic, kind of like what we looked at today.

Those auto cert rules. We didn't necessarily have the matching rules, but it's something that we would, we would like to kind of discuss with you in depth if that's a need for you. They can set that stuff up.

Right. So it does not have to fall on the IT group to bottleneck the process in it. You know, I have a master's in IT. I kind of get it. I don't want to be the bottleneck when I'm masquerading as an IT person.

There's everything kind of falls on IT. So we empower you to kind of pick. Does it make sense to have your finance and accounting team lead it? Because they understand the process. I would probably do that if it was my decision.

Or does IT need to be in a mix a little bit beyond just the integrations and the data kind of connections that are going to be needed? Perfect. Great. Thank you. Well, we did have a few more questions, but I'm sorry we haven't got time now in this session, but thank you very much.

I just like to say if you, if you did really enjoy what you saw and you'd like to make contact with us, please do visit our website. There's options there to reach out to us. You know, please do stay connected with OneStream and you can check out our blog there on the website.

We do post quite regularly in different topic areas. There's also news and events pages. You can keep up with the events that we have in different regions around, around the globe. You can also follow OneStream on social media.

Many of those are listed on the screen. So it just really for me to say, Derek, thank you for your excellent demonstration today. To all our attendees. Thank you for spending time with us. And we do hope you'll join us in one of these sessions again soon.

Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you, everybody. Y'all have a great one. Thank you.