Johannesburg, – Resilience is key to building a successful and sustainable organisation capable of withstanding internal and external shocks. Building resilience asks that the organisation bed down stable and agile financial foundations that are aligned with global and local governance, risk and compliance (GRC) mandates. This ensures that the business is operating within parameters that minimise errors, improve processes, and refine operational mandates. As McKinsey highlights, a ‘better risk governance model is key for effective and efficient decision-making and crisis management’ and that strengthening resilience requires that financial elements and impacts are always considered and managed.
As a business heading into the complex headwinds of economic and political instability, alongside budget and market complexity, having a stable financial foundation and reliable GRC can prove invaluable. To this end, companies should look to investing into tools and technologies that will help them navigate the GRC hurdles, overcome roadblocks and improve decision-making, reporting and forecasting.
“Companies are faced with growing complexity and often decision-makers feel like they have limited visibility into accounting and finance functions,” says Stephen Howe, Director at Times 3 Technologies, a Sage Platinum Business Partner. “They want to know more about certain aspects of their business, about how to manage their data more effectively, and how to engage with revenue recognition, forecasting and metrics. These granular insights into the very lifeblood of the organisation can fundamentally shape how it plans investment, manages risk, ensures governance and embed compliance.”
The problem is that organisations don’t have the systems they need to automate, track, manage and control their data and processes. Legacy investments – expensive and often unwieldy – are holding them back from truly renovating their business functions and their approaches to GRC. The challenge is to offset the cost of a system that can transform these challenges against the system that’s creating them. Ultimately, GRC is not going away – if anything, the legislations and regulations that shape GRC on local and global stages are becoming increasingly complicated to navigate. Companies cannot afford to be left with holes in their data or finances, especially when it comes to protecting data and information or ensuring that billing and expenditure can be accurately justified.
Each of the pillars of GRC plays a role in ensuring that the organisation can align its finance structure and behaviours with organisational objectives and external mandates. These will vary from industry to sector, but ultimately are designed to mitigate the business-as-usual silo mentality that results in poor visibility, limited control, and stagnating inefficiencies. When these pillars are blended with a financial system that has the tools to automate and reshape data management, then the business can potentially create an ecosystem that’s so transparent and accessible that it improves how employees engage, and how decision-makers move forward.
“Using the right solution, the business can access information at speed and then analyse it in different ways to gain improved insights,” says Howe. “Financial data can be rapidly moved around, reports can be easily created and shared, and information is up-to-date so that every decision is based on highly relevant insights. You can also use financial tools to improve billing and payments and this, in turn can result in measurable improvements in customer and revenue growth. By mitigating risk while embedding compliance and ensuring shared governance across functions, the business can become more strategic in its responses and its approaches.”
With Sage Intacct – a modular true cloud financial management platform that adds in flex, scale and GRC functionalities – and Times 3 Technologies, a Sage X3 implementation partner, you can stay ahead of the complexities of the modern market and remain competitive and compliant. You can use the platform to create an agile organisation that’s capable of embedding transparency and rigour into operations whilst allowing for comprehensive financial management that goes beyond silos and achieves the key success factor of today – resilience.
