Data plays ‘critical role’ in transforming systems, finance teams told
The financial controller of Webjet shares his experiences overhauling the company’s systems and highlights the importance of good data governance.
Finance teams and CFOs looking to overhaul their systems and create more efficient processes must also focus on the quality of their data, according to group financial controller of Webjet, Matthew McKenzie.
McKenzie sought to implement a new system for his company shortly after joining his role to rectify issues impacting the finance team.
Some of the biggest concerns related to the time to close, the quality of data and whether the right controls and systems were in place, he explained.
"We were looking to accelerate our close process. It was taking us around 15 to 18 business days to close the books every month which was not ideal from an accounting perspective because we'd get to the end of the month and have to do it all over again," McKenzie said.
"There were a lot of workarounds, a lot of Excel and a lot of manual processes which worked but were inefficient."
With the company looking to implement a new ERP, the finance team also looked to resolve these issues on the reporting side.
"We looked at how we could provide senior management with the right information in the right amount of time so that they can make decisions on that and that was the catalyst for how we started that journey," he said.
Another important part was improving the risk framework to ensure that the board was across what the closeout process looks like, he added.
In terms of determining what the right solution could be, McKenzie worked with the CFO and head of IT systems and conducted functional interviews with his team and other departments.
"While it would have been easy for me as a senior leader to just sit there and dictate what we use you need to engage with the people who are going to be using the system," McKenzie said.
"So, there was a big process in doing demos of both OneStream, which was the solution we went with, and the other solutions as well and ranking them in terms of ease of reporting and ease of end user experience and how intuitive the system was."
McKenzie said involving the end users as part of the decision-making process and eliciting feedback from them ensures that they feel heard and that they understand how the new system may impact their role.
One of the key takeaways from the transformation to new systems was understanding the importance of data governance and the use of data, according to McKenzie.
"It's all about data quality, scrubbing your data, understanding your hierarchies and understanding how you want to pull your data together because if you bring garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. So, invest time upfront with your staff to understand what the right data should be," he said.
"Make your adjustments and cleanse your data through each part of your implementation, and make sure it's reconciled and ties back to your reported numbers and that you also have the transactional basis there to keep going."
It is also critical that CFOs and financial controllers are realistic when planning resourcing for a significant shift in systems and processes.
"While you might think, well we're just doing this as an add-on component to our normal job, in reality you need a critical mass of people to push it forward," he said.
McKenzie stressed that data cleanup and being able to place reliance on numbers can also help finance teams provide clarity to the board, investors and analysts.
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