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5 Important Financial Data Management Best Practices

Global organizations understand the importance of high-quality financial data to align with corporate standards, satisfy internal controls, and meet external financial reporting requirements.

The challenge for many organizations is meeting the needs of financial data management without access to modern software for Corporate Performance Management (CPM).

If your organization is relying on Excel spreadsheets or outdated, legacy CPM software, you are likely challenged to fulfill the intricate needs of internal and external requirements in a desired fashion.

The headwind to meet the challenge could be time, cost, or other responsibilities. What this points to is the need for your team to follow data management best practices.

The pathway to support best practices is migrating to a unified, modern CPM solution that ensures the integrity of your financial data. The solution is OneStream XF.

How OneStream XF Supports Data Management Best Practices

The OneStream XF platform is the proven alternative to Excel spreadsheets and legacy CPM applications to support Finance. The platform was designed to simplify processes such as data management for sophisticated, global enterprises.

Organizations that migrate to OneStream Software gain confidence in the accuracy of their financial data because of the single source of data and the standard, defined, and repeatable processes for maximum confidence and reliability.

Following this path allows your organization to support data management best practices in the following five ways.

1. Simplify Data Integration

Data integration is critical to ensure the validity of the data. Organizations that rely on Excel or outdated CPM software know how complex the process is trying to integrate data from multiple sources.

To solve this challenge, OneStream created a series of capabilities that all naturally live and work together so that organizations don’t have to do the hard part of integrating or connecting separate technologies together.

OneStream built the OneStream XF platform to have a full set of capabilities to solve the most sophisticated business problems and give your team the ability to easily follow best practices for data integration. Complex data integration processes are now simplified.

2. Trust the Data

When handling financial data, your teams need to be able to trust the data. They need confidence that what they are seeing is accurate and reliable for internal and external reporting requirements.

OneStream XF improves the integrity of the data by delivering pre and post-data loading validations and confirmations. The result is complete confidence in the certification process.

Plus, the simplified data integration process builds upon itself. The OneStream XF platform includes powerful pre-built XF Integration Connectors with drill-back and drill-through capabilities to authenticate the source of the data in alignment with best practices. Data is trustworthy with OneStream.

3. Validate the Data

Before handing financial data to internal or external stakeholders, there is a critical final step of validating the data. For users of Excel spreadsheets or legacy CPM solutions, this becomes a time-consuming challenge attempting to validate the data.

OneStream XF supports the validation process through 100 percent data transparency. Plus, process change visibility is built into the platform to track changes from source to report, make adjustments, and address variances.

Instead of spending costly time tracking down where data came from, your team can spend more time ensuring the validity of the data in accordance with best practices. Data sources are validated and transparent.

4. Audit the Data

Sophisticated organizations need strict audit controls to ensure that your teams followed data management best practices when working with the data.

OneStream XF includes built-in audit trails and financial intelligence to deliver transparency, auditability, and data protection for complete confidence and compliance.

The data is captured in distinct buckets, journal adjustments and eliminations never disappear during Consolidations, data protection is automatic, and the platform has built-in protections against inadvertent data overrides. Audits are automatic; not burdensome.

5. Improve Data Management

Finally, organizations that utilize OneStream XF can improve their entire data management process to ensure continued alignment with data management best practices for internal and external purposes.

Guided Workflows in the OneStream XF platform help organizations achieve financial data quality management and verification throughout financial consolidation, reporting, and planning processes.

These processes help standardize and simplify data collections and analysis, end-users continue to gain knowledge and experience interacting with workflows, and OneStream XF serves up the correct processes and reports to optimize time management. The quality of your data management builds upon itself to meet the next challenge.

Work With HollandParker for OneStream XF Implementation

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Our CPM consulting firm is supremely confident in OneStream XF to support your financial data management needs and to help align with data management best practices.

As a Diamond Implementation partner, we can support your organization with the migration to OneStream XF to replace Excel spreadsheets or outdated, fragmented CPM software.

OneStream simplified the complexities of managing financial data to ensure accuracy and reliability for your organization. To find out more about how data is trustworthy, validated, and auditable in the OneStream XF platform, contact our firm today.

We would appreciate the opportunity to discuss the challenges you experience with financial data management in your organization.