The new numbers game: Accenture’s Finance transformation

With 86% of CFOs agreeing that the speed of strategic decision making has increased, what if they could use real-time data from across the enterprise to predict business performance faster and more accurately? That is what we have done at Accenture by transforming our Finance function to create more value for our business, people, clients and shareholders. And we’ll continue this journey as part of our commitment to Total Enterprise Reinvention. The foundation of our reinvention is a strong digital core that is in the cloud. Now, every Finance team across the world uses the same system, the same metrics and works in a consistent way. This brings greater rigor to our transactions, deeper insights on financial data and enables enhanced advisory support on complicated finance questions.

Reimagining the future of finance

We reimagined policies, reinvented processes and invested in automation and digital technologies to streamline manual tasks. We still need basic transactional, accounting, controlling, reporting and compliance activities, but our Finance people spend less time on these areas than in the past and more time on higher value work, e.g. driving financial and commercial acumen in the wider Accenture business. And we now leverage advanced technologies like machine learning on core transactional processes such as journal reconciliations and providing self-service solutions with better experiences for business processes e.g. invoicing and sales booking. We’re using predictive and generative AI to enhance forecasting and financial reporting, improve forecast accuracy and reduce cycle time.

Transforming to meet tomorrow’s needs

As Accenture’s business continues to grow in scale and complexity, Finance plays an important role in our ability to consistently create shareholder value—which for us means growing faster than the market, driving sustainable margin expansion while investing at scale, and maintaining strong cashflow with consistent and disciplined capital allocation. And we’ll continue to transform our Finance organization to meet tomorrow’s demands—focusing on delivering value, developing talent and becoming even more effective advisors to the business. We have learned and achieved a lot in our journey and our experience of reinvention at scale is helping our clients transform their Finance organizations and their entire enterprise.