Technology for Modern Finance TeamsBy Stuart Miller and Mike Rost

WHITE PAPER

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Business imperatives for modern finance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Technology shortfalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Software platform requirements to support modern finance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Modern finance delivered in the cloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Data experience platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Repeatable reporting framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Digital review and mobile access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

About the authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Table of contents

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The information contained herein is proprietary to Workiva and cannot be copied, published, or distributed without the express prior written consent of Workiva © 2016.

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IntroductionOrganizations looking for high growth and aggressive market share need to consider how to scale their businesses wisely, or risk losing out on key financing vehicles. In 2016, the rules changed.

Financing methods, such as venture capital, private equity, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), debt financing, and the capital markets not only now expect high growth, but also expect a clear roadmap to profitability.

To address the changing environment, fast-growing companies should embrace the concepts of modern finance to steer their growth in the right direction.

This white paper will examine the following modern finance topics:

• Importance of modern finance to business strategy – Business imperatives associated with modern finance initiatives and how finance and accounting departments can address these challenges, including suggested business process improvements in the area of monthly management and performance reporting.

• Current software landscape – The technology shortcomings of current IT systems, will be discussed including on-premise databases and traditional desktop productivity tools. A strong case will be made for the abandonment of these legacy systems for collaborative processes, such as corporate performance management (CPM) that are critical for initiatives.

• How to modernize finance – Why the introduction of a cloud data experience platform and repeatable reporting framework form the backbone of the new breed of performance reporting applications, which can help the modern finance department deliver on the promise of modern finance.

Technology for Modern Finance TeamsBy Stuart Miller and Mike Rost

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Macroeconomic factors and external influences

Key macroeconomic concerns for CFOs for first half of 2016, according to Deloitte research, CFO Signals:3

• Worldwide economic health, including slowing growth in both developed and developing economies, and concerns of global overreliance on the U.S. economy.

• Market volatility from global concerns including Chinese currency weakness, stalled international trade, and the exit of Britain from the European Union.

• Low oil prices have mixed, industry-dependent impacts: Nearly 75 percent of CFOs say low oil prices are impacting either demand or profitability and in some cases, both. Just over half cite negative

impacts. Oil/gas and insurance CFOs cite the negative profit impacts, while manufacturing and retail/wholesale cite the negative demand impacts. Conversely, nearly 60 percent cite positive impacts. Manufacturing, services, and healthcare/pharma CFOs cite the positive profit impacts and manufacturing and power/utilities cite the positive demand impacts.

• Equity markets are no longer overvalued: 30 percent of CFOs say U.S. markets are overvalued, which is down sharply from 56 percent in the previous quarter.

• Debt is becoming less attractive: 68 percent say debt is currently an attractive financing option, down from 80 percent in the previous quarter.

Business imperatives for modern finance “Margins, not market share” was the quote from General Motors Company CEO Mary Barra during her speech to her senior leadership team about how to focus its strategic goal-setting activities.1

While most private and public companies still must push top-line growth and gain market share quickly, they now must do it with increasing focus on operating costs including business unit and sales efficiency. They must now scale their businesses smartly not just through organic business growth, but through M&A, debt financing, and capital markets.

In a 2016 survey conducted by the Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF), margins/earnings performance was the top priority for the more than 600 CFOs, vice presidents and directors of finance, and controllers who completed the survey.2 This reflects the increasing vigilance finance departments, for both private and public companies, are applying to manage profitability and protect organizational value.

The principles of modern finance apply to every organization—public companies and private companies, large and small—must pay special attention to these principles if they plan on approaching the capital markets for growth funding. For private and public companies, both public markets and private investors are now emphasizing strong revenue growth, but with a roadmap to becoming operating cash flow positive and ultimately to profitability.

The “growth at all costs” mentality for software and technology companies has waned for investors. For software as a service companies in particular, valuations in late 2015 and early 2016 were impacted more by increased gross margins, increased EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) margins, and reduced time to breakeven on an operating cash flow basis.

This paper will examine key macroeconomic factors, external influences, and critical transformation initiatives that CFOs are most likely to face during their modern finance journey.

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Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity attacks are becoming more frequent, opportunistic, and sophisticated. With the mobile workforce on the rise, the concerns are greatly amplified. Focus has turned away from just building a “castle moat” to keep intruders out, and turned to building internal walls to protect proprietary or business critical data once intruders get in. Because of these trends, there is an increased concern that legacy productivity and communication platforms, like Excel® and email, pose a great security threat, because it is impossible to build walls around them.

Cybersecurity has emerged as a top priority for CFOs as evidenced by the FERF study:4

• Cybersecurity concerns permeate the finance function. There is little doubt that IT security and privacy is far more than just an IT issue today. It represents a strategic organizational risk, and not surprisingly, one that ranks near the very top of finance professionals’ priority lists.

• Cybersecurity represents a significant priority companies face escalating attacks on multiple fronts and finance leaders consider the financial impact of a breach, along with the security of the organization’s financial and proprietary data.

Policy and regulation uncertainty

Due to the changing landscape of policies, regulations, and enforcement, CFOs are now spending more time on regulatory affairs. The Deloitte survey showed that almost 50 percent of companies are politically active, partially due to advocacy efforts around regulation.5

Some key changes include:

Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)FLSA changes—expected to raise the minimum salary and eliminate exemptions from overtime—are getting significant attention from U.S. CFOs, with nearly half saying they have already planned for the impacts or plan to do so.6

FASB revenue recognitionThe revenue recognition standard remained an emerging issue for CFOs in 2016 even though the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) deferred the effective date of this standard this past summer, it indicated to companies that they should not delay in preparing organizations for this change.7

Fair value measurementsPCAOB-increased scrutiny of valuations by external auditors debuted as an emerging issue for CFOs in 2016, particularly as it related to forecasting. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) is increasing oversight on auditor scrutiny of fair value measurements as it relates to testing goodwill for impairment, which will now include scrutiny for material shifts in management’s forecast, year-over-year, and/or failure to achieve previously forecasted results.8

Lease accountingThe FASB’s new lease accounting standard update (ASU) was issued Feb. 25, 2016. The new leasing standard presents dramatic changes to the balance sheets of lessees. Lessor accounting is updated to align with certain changes in the lessee model and the new revenue recognition standard.9

This ASU will require organizations that lease assets—referred to as “lessees”—to recognize on the balance sheet the assets and liabilities for the rights and obligations created by those leases.10

Foreign Corrupt Practice Act (FCPA)The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the SEC are increasingly targeting individuals—including CFOs —for fines. Fines can cost companies billions of dollars, whether in actual fines or in response to the FCPA-related investigations. In an article from Bloomberg, a large U.S. retailer has spent more than three-quarters of a billion dollars on its own global investigation and to revamp its compliance operations after 2012 reports of bribery in its foreign operations.11

The specter of FCPA-related charges makes it all the more important for CFOs to have robust anti-corruption programs in place—and have evidence that the programs are operating effectively, including more effective internal controls and updated internal audit programs

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Transformation initiatives

Given the uncertainty of the macroeconomic and regulatory environment, transformative initiatves will be critical to adding value across the business and to being a better business partner.

• Reengineer finance processes – With flat to declining finance budgets, reengineering key finance processes is a critical path to freeing up resources to focus on more value-added activities such as trend analysis.

• Improve finance performance management capability – If finance is to effectively add value across the enterprise, it must first demonstrate efficiency and value within its own business processes. Hackett Group has found that companies with superior enterprise performance management capabilities are more likely to outperform their industry peers on company financial metrics. Examples include reporting and planning more efficiently and forecasting more accurately.

The key for finance is to focus these efforts on the information required to support critical business decisions and on looking for opportunities to reduce the amount of time and effort spent analyzing data.

Five leading consulting groups that focus on technical accounting—FP&A, business performance management, M&A, IPO-readiness, and business transformation—highlight the following critical transformation initiatives for finance and accounting teams. These initiatives are:

• Reengineer finance processes

• Improve performance management capabilities

• Performance-based risk management

• IPO readiness: “Get your house in order”

Reengineer finance processes

The concept of reengineering is a key highlight of the Hackett Group’s The CFO Agenda: Target Five Key Transformations Initiatives to Move Finance Forward:12

“The concept of reengineering has been around for more than 20 years, yet the direction that finance functions are taking continues to evolve. Digitization, robotic process automation, cloud, and new self-service analytics tools are technological game-changers for finance, as it looks for ways to revamp its processes and be more responsive to customers.

Since there will be little or no additional money in the finance budget this year, reengineering processes for greater efficiency is the main way to free up funds for investing in value-creation processes while demonstrating continued commitment to maintaining a competitive cost structure. The basics of process improvement have not changed - initiatives in this area should strive for ever greater standardization, simplification, and elimination of non-essential activities.”

Prioritization of reengineering efforts is critical. Two of the top three categories prioritized for reengineering were related to financial and performance reporting: Planning and performance management/business analysis (leading with 71 percent of respondents) and general accounting and external reporting (third with 54 percent of respondents).13

Improve performance management capabilities

Finance departments must deliver value to the organization, and performance management helps bring value in the areas of strategy, key performance indicators (KPIs), and cost reduction. Improved performance management will make the finance function, and the enterprise as a whole, more agile. Rather than reacting once sales have dipped or once costs have risen, agile finance groups will be able to act on information more quickly with a corporate performance system (CPM) which serves as finance’s early detection system.

What is clear from both the FERF study and the Hackett Group’s study is that finance teams want a single, real-time version of the truth so they can develop more timely and more accurate data collection, data analysis, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities.

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Improving performance management was a top priority highlighted in two different studies. Key findings from the FERF study showed performance management as the top priority in the financial analysis process capabilities section of the survey. The findings were:

• Financial analysis activities, including strategic planning, budgeting, and performance management, are among the highest ranked priorities for CFOs and finance executives.

• Finance teams are working hard to arm their business partners throughout the organization with more precise and real-time information on performance, cash positions, and profitability drivers to strengthen strategic decision making.

• More importance is being placed on risk management, profitability analysis, and reporting, and BI indicates that the finance functions continue to want to leverage big data and analytics to broaden how they conceive organize, and perform traditional CPM capabilities.

• As performance management activities become more precise and comprehensive, CFOs have the desire to share findings with the board of directors.14

The Hackett Group found that superior CPM capabilities can be correlated with better financial performance for companies compared to their peer group. CPM top performers see 4.4 percent higher net margins than others in their industry and deliver 21 percent better total shareholder returns, on average.15

Top performers are also far more successful when executing a wide array of strategic initiatives, including mergers and acquisitions, business transformation, technology implementation, new product and geographic expansion, and major supply chain improvement efforts.

Performance-based risk management

It has never been more important for CFOs to integrate business strategy and execution with enterprise risk management (ERM) under the performance management umbrella. This importance is highlighted in two studies: Maintaining Margins While Staying Vigilant and CFO Insights: What’s keeping CFOs up in 2014?16

• CFOs now see the need for connecting ERM to business performance. Performance management— particularly within CPM—needs to expand to integrate risk management, profitability analysis and financial and performance reporting, which will continue to underscore the importance of viewing forecasts and budgets through a risk lens.

• The importance placed on risk management, profitability analysis and reporting,17 and business intelligence indicates that finance functions continue to want to leverage big data and analytics to broaden how they conceive, organize, and perform traditional corporate performance management capabilities.

• CFOs must ask themselves which internal and external risks do they regard as most worrisome for business performance.

• CFOs need to pay increased attention to high-impact, low-frequency risks because they have been identified as risks that can drive 20 percent or greater value losses.

In addition to connecting ERM to CPM, it is important to integrate integrate strategic risks into the planning process.

IPO readiness: “Getting your house in order”

For private companies, the above transformations are key to creating a path to liquidity, whether that path is going public, being acquired, or continuing to operate as a private entity. More simply put, path planning is really “getting your house in order” for a liquidity event. Beginning to think and act like a public company, with ongoing progress toward rapid and accurate financial and accounting processes is a critical first step.

IPO-readiness consulting firm Armanino Group cite that best-in-class organizations use 12–24 months to ramp up to put the right people, systems, and processes in place.17

They further recommend adopting the following 12–18 months prior to IPO:18

1. Timely budget preparation and review processes2. Close processes3. Quarterly financial reporting and historical audits

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The table below shows the key characteristics and timeline of IPO readiness, which we like to call getting your house in order.

18 to 24 Months 12 to 18 months 3 to 12 months 6 months

Internal Processes

• Keep the books

• Identify and track key external metrics

• Implement timely budget preparation and review all processes

• Implement accounting policies

• Document key business processes and remediate control deficiencies

• Practice actual to budget quarterly

• Conduct more frequent reporting, including monthly performance reporting

• Set human resources policies and procedures

• Identify human resources, legal, and IT risk management

• Keep rolling forecast

• Budget to actual monthly with department heads

• Prepare to draft S-1

• Prepare mock earnings releases and call scripts

• Hold quarterly board meetings with committee reports

• Execute first 10-Q and XBRL tagging

• Execute on first earnings release

Transitions • Appoint auditors

• Select legal counsel

• Adopt long-term incentive program

• Audited Annual Report (10-Q like)

• Appoint relevant public company board members and set up committees

• Complete historical audits

• Appoint dedicated IPO leadership team

• Select bankers and banker due diligence

• Choose exchange

• Assess need for additional technical accountants for SEC reporting and investor relations personnel

• Retain SOX resources and develop Sec.404 compliance plan

• Appoint auditors

• Select legal counsel

• Adopt long-term incentive program

Business process improvement

With the economic factors, external drivers, and transformation initiatives outlined above, it is important for finance teams to take early steps toward becoming a modern finance organization. Consider an agile approach that starts with business process improvement for performance management, in particular weekly and monthly performance reporting, including integrated monthly reviews. This allows companies to have systematic reporting on the state of the business (past, present, and future) and supports agile review and adjustment, and rapid, informed decision making.

The most important modern finance business imperative is the adoption of weekly and monthly performance reporting and integrated monthly management review to support high-velocity, informed decision making.

A software platform will facilitate a new breed of performance reporting that supports weekly and monthly reports across all departments. These reports cannot be generated from an ERP or consolidation system as a canned report. They must combine numbers and narrative for deeper context and business insights. These reports form the backbone of weekly and monthly team and executive reviews.

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To achieve weekly and monthly performance reporting that cuts across accounting, finance, sales, business operations, risk, and audit, the burden of manual data collection, aggregation, and manual report-building must be lifted from finance teams. It should be replaced with technology that provides an integrated data platform and a repeatable reporting framework to automate performance reporting.

This new breed of performance reporting will support rapid growth objectives through faster decision making. Adoption of internal controls management software to ensure appropriate cost controls and compliance completes the equation for modern finance. For public companies, controls management supports Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance. For private companies, we recommend adopting an internal controls framework supported by controls management software to start getting your house in order for IPO and/or M&A.

Before we discuss software platforms that support modern finance in more detail, let’s first examine some critical shortfalls in data and reporting technologies that are preventing companies from achieving their objectives today.

Technology shortfalls This section will focus on the current technology shortfalls with Microsoft® Excel.®

Excel is a flexible and pervasive tool in most finance departments. Although Excel was designed to be a personal productivity tool, its use has expanded in many finance and accounting departments to manage complex business processes, and financial and management reporting where multiple departments or subsidiaries are involved. The complexity of this traditional spreadsheet challenge exists in all sectors—private and public companies, state and local governments, education, and non-profit institutions.

While financial data typically originates in financial and operational transaction systems, such as a general ledger or consolidation applications, it inevitably ends up in Excel to augment the system and to conduct ad hoc analysis or data aggregation across unstructured data ecosystems. Once in Excel, the data is available for anyone with access to make changes to the data, charts, and underlying formulas.

To make matters worse, a 2013 survey on planning and forecasting revealed that 93 percent of finance managers globally say that they are drowning in desktop spreadsheets. This was especially true in the area of financial planning and budget control, with 75 percent of respondents indicating they used spreadsheets in this area and 74 percent using them in financial reporting and analysis.19

As businesses grow and the number of desktop spreadsheets are used to manage business multiply across more and more collaborative business processes, the continued use of desktop spreadsheets can pose challenges, including:

1. Data access challenges and manual processes

2. Security and performance

3. Data integrity and quality

Data access and manual processes

While Excel is an excellent tool for individual tactical projects, even the most sophisticated users struggle to perform robust planning and management reporting within a group or across departments.

In most Excel-based processes, each department uses some kind of template that has been distributed via email. Departments often modify data with no audit trail and no narrative or commentary for finance or others to understand changes. Worksheets are passed up the management chain for additional input or approval, also via email, without any audit trail outside of an email thread. Worksheets are sent back and forth for comment and edits until everyone is satisfied with the numbers or exhausted from the process.

When the collection phase is finally complete, the finance department must aggregate and reconcile the data in each submittal—a process that is tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming. This is particularly tedious

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in planning processes that are scenario-driven. Any time management wants to see an alternate version or updated assumption, finance needs to initiate another round of data collection, aggregation, and data-checking.

A survey by Ventana Research highlights these issues:20

Nearly three-fourths of respondents said that their most important spreadsheets are the ones they share with others.

Two-thirds of respondents use spreadsheets to collect data from multiple people and to create reports shared across the organization.

Three-fourths of respondents use spreadsheets to summarize and consolidate values that are included in documents, as do about two-thirds who use them to create operational awareness so people know what to do next.

Four-fifths of respondents said that they suffered from the routine and time-consuming activity of having to combine data from multiple spreadsheets to perform some business process. The average was five spreadsheets combined at a time.

Security and performance

Excel® celebrated its 30th birthday in 2015.21 Excel was designed as a desktop spreadsheet with individual use in mind. Even for individuals, traditional spreadsheets also pose a security management challenge as it’s difficult to restrict access to authorized people and to track who changed what and when. In the worst cases, spreadsheets have been a vehicle for financial fraud.

The real issues arose when Excel was about 10 years old. In the mid 1990s, email was becoming mainstream

in the business environment. With the advent of email, teams at companies all over the world began to email Excel spreadsheets as email attachments as a form of collaboration.

A study of Enron’s emails after bankruptcy showed that 10 percent of all Enron email contained or referred to a desktop spreadsheet.22 Email is inherently insecure. Once an email is sent, all control is lost. By allowing a team to share spreadsheets via email, a company is leaving those spreadsheets vulnerable to unauthorized access and alteration.

Users could easily see data that they should not have access to, such as salaries and other confidential information. Preventing that is nearly impossible with the everyday use of email and attachments. Even password-protected sheets and locked cells are inadequate in today’s compliance and controls environment.

In addition, email can be forwarded to anyone, inside or outside your company’s walls. Not only does this cause security concerns with unintended access to attachments by the wrong recipient, but can also involve sending the wrong version or premature version of an attachment outside the firewall to a third-party. Sometimes with disastrous results, just ask Google. In 2012, Google’s financial printer used a draft version of the company’s earnings release to file an 8-K disclosure prematurely with the SEC.23

Spreadsheets as email attachments to outside parties can be particularly dangerous. In the Ventana survey, two-thirds of respondents used spreadsheets to collaborate with people outside the company frequently or occasionally. In addition, participants most commonly used email to communicate questions about important spreadsheets shared with others, and the inherent time lags in that conduit can slow processes even more.24

Desktop spreadsheet performance and scalability pose additional problems for companies. The process to update an Excel financial model is not fast, not accurate, and not robust. Excel is not a scalable database. It can hold only so many columns and rows of data, calculations, and charts before it starts to crash.

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While desktop spreadsheets can support robust modeling, they’re weak from an enterprise perspective. The ability to create a large-scale model across multiple product categories, product lines, business units, geographies, or subsidiaries is next to impossible. Because of these limitations, organizations cannot develop true enterprise models, allowing each subunit to have its own operational drivers.

Instead, each subunit develops its own models with appropriate drivers and then manually feed a data collection process that aggregates into the organizational b-level model. This turns what could be a valuable enterprise modeling exercise into a cumbersome, manual data-collection process to rationalize a series of disconnected sub-unit models.

Data integrity and quality

Data integrity and quality issues with desktop spreadsheets show up in the form of errors, version control problems, untraceable data, and lack of audit trails. The manual nature of stand-alone spreadsheets opens the organization to data integrity issues.

Without a comprehensive audit trail, every user who accesses a spreadsheet represents a potential risk to the integrity of the data it contains and the numbers cannot be trusted. At this point, the entire process becomes contaminated and called into question.

Without a purpose-built solution, companies are forced to rely on a disparate

set of tools including Microsoft,® Word,® Excel,® and PowerPoint® for authoring; shared drives, content repositories, and three-ring binders to manage source documents and drafts; and email for collaboration.

This file-based approach quickly results in multiple revisions as collaborators mark up separate copies to provide input or make changes. It takes additional effort to reconcile these, and there is no coherent audit trail.25

spreadsheet creators have very little control over who can edit formula cells, so sooner or later, problems will arise. And the more complex the models, the more the potential for human error. When mistakes are detected—often well after the fact tracking down the source of the trouble can be a nightmare. Who changed what and when? Excel is a flexible tool. It allows anyone to make changes to data, charts, and formulas.

As businesses grow and the original spreadsheets are updated by several people, errors are inevitably introduced into both the formulas and the data itself. These desktop spreadsheets are assumed to be correct even though research from The Wall Street Journal MarketWatch shows that 88 percent of spreadsheets have errors. About 50 percent of the participants in the survey said they found errors in data frequently or occasionally, and one-third find errors in formulas in the most important process they use spreadsheets for.26

In addition to errors within a single desktop spreadsheet, companies suffer from having multiple versions of the same spreadsheet, data timeliness, lack of an audit trail, and lack of sufficient supporting documentation to substantiate data or claims made in reports.

Keeping track of who changed what and how it was changed is a monumental task. This is made even more difficult by having multiple versions of the same desktop spreadsheet that do not agree with each other. Forty-three percent of respondents in the Ventana survey said they faced this issue frequently or all the time.27

Timeliness of data remains one of the toughest challenges for finance departments especially when they work for other departments, lines of business, or subsidiaries. Ventana’s research shows the following:28

• In a quarter of all organizations, out-of-date information appears frequently in spreadsheets that support important business processes.

• As companies get larger, the frequency and use of outdated information approaches 50 percent.

• 40 percent of respondents said the spreadsheets they use on a daily or weekly basis are not timely.

Supporting documentation is often lacking and it is not connected to the context which the data is used. It is therefore frequently not sufficient

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enough for auditors. Some companies spend months and hire extra people to support the external auditors because it is so difficult to find consistent data, to trace data changes, and to provide substantiating documentation.

Even when the quality of the data appears to be correct, the context may be wrong. The fundamental issue is that the data in Excel knows nothing about itself—it is dumb. It does not have narrative or commentary embedded (even with comments in Excel, data is disconnected from its meaning). It does not know its own history. There is no tracking of lineage, how data changed over time, or provenance (who touched it along the way, who reviewed and who approved?).

Is the data timely? Without this, it’s easy to make the wrong assumptions and therefore make mistaken conclusions. This is how a desktop spreadsheet can be right and wrong at the same time.

There must be a way for “data to be smarter” and for teams to work smarter. The next section will examine how intelligent cloud-based technologies can solve these problems and support modern finance.

Software platform requirements to support modern financeGartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, recently split up its longstanding Corporate Performance Management (CPM) quadrant into two categories: Financial CPM (FCPM) and Strategic CPM (SCPM).

FCPM includes: Financial consolidation, financial reporting, management reporting, costing, forecasting, close management, intercompany transactions, and disclosure management. SCPM includes: Corporate planning and modeling and performance reporting.

Performance reporting, is described by Gartner as taking “management reporting to a new level of inclusion and ease of use.”29 Performance Reporting has an emphasis on reporting across FCPM and SCPM, with the goal of enabling business process improvements for rapid and informed decision-making. A software platform for performance reporting provides the platform needed for weekly and monthly reports across multiple departments, combining numbers and narrative for deeper context and business insights. These reports form the backbone of weekly and monthly team and executive reviews.

A modern finance platform for performance reporting must provide:

A data experience and a repeatable reporting framework combining numbers and narrative

• A single, real-time version of the truth for as-reported data, consolidated from system data and unstructured ad hoc data that’s owned and maintained by finance, not IT

• “Continuous financial and performance reporting” to drive the business by keeping the meaningful information at your fingertips every week or month—automation built into quarterly and annual reporting

• Combination of narrative with numbers so you always have the right context for business insights

• A way to “Get your house in order” to prepare for IPO or other capitalization strategies

Improved control of processes to mitigate corporate risk

• Unparalleled reporting accuracy through integrated data linking, so you can trust your numbers again

• Comprehensive audit trail and supporting documentation to facilitate internal and external audits

• Engage external stakeholders with confidence—no more disconnect between board reports and your financial reports

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Secure, cloud-based platform for finance, internal controls, and risk

• Connect finance with compliance, audit, and risk without complex IT investment

• Easily link to internal controls framework

• Performance-based ERM—tie your enterprise risk management to business performance, including strategic planning and forecasting

• Grow team-by-team without complex project plans and large consulting billings. You can start with accounting processes, move to finance, then add internal controls, and ERM.

The key software requirements for performance reporting include:

• Cloud-based infrastructure • Data experience platform (DXP)

• Repeatable reporting framework • Digital review and mobile access

These requirements will be discussed in detail in the following sections.

Modern finance delivered in the cloudMost finance teams are geographically dispersed and include global business units. Key operations data may also come from a global supply chain. It is key that modern finance applications be delivered in the cloud to provide instant and easy access to individuals in any division or company, residing anywhere around the globe. The same type of access is extremely cumbersome and expensive to achieve with on-premise systems that require a complex network and VPN (virtual private network) infrastructure and firewall configurations maintained by large IT staffs.

Pure cloud systems enable rapid deployment of solutions, which can put business applications in the hands of users sooner than traditional enterprise software and on-premise deployments. This

provides companies with a lower cost for implementation and quicker time to value.

In addition, pure cloud platforms are continually upgraded, which enables all users to be on the latest version of the software and removes the cost and hassle of IT involvement or cumbersome installations on users’ local computers. Many on-premise systems experience lengthy IT delays when upgrades are attempted. In contrast, many cloud-based solutions are updated several times a month, with no negative impact to the end user.

Companies should look for systems that are designed for business users and don’t require IT involvement, including system administration. These systems tend to focus on simpler user experiences by avoiding complex interfaces. Why should something as simple as creating a new template, building a report,

adding a user, or changing user permissions require IT involvement?

Of course, companies can choose to involve IT when necessary, but requiring that involvement substantially slows down the pace of productivity. Finance and accounting managers should be able to control the platform for their teams by using “zero IT” software that is easy to access, use, and administer.

These types of user-friendly solutions are more readily adopted, have higher customer satisfaction ratings, and reduce IT overhead for maintenance, changes, and upgrades. Analysts predict that complex on-premise solutions such ERP systems will migrate to the cloud more aggressively due to some of these constraints.30

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On-Premise Cloud-Based

Future of software delivery x

Rapid innovation x

Customer/Vendor shared risk model x

Application and infrastructure economies of scale x

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) x

IT deployment x optional

IT administration x optional

Seamless and non-disruptive maintenance and upgrades x

Proactive infrastructure scaling x

Uptime and availability x x

Natively designed for global web access x

Data redundancy (3 or more instances) x

Data security x x

Security innovation x

Data experience platform A primary requirement for achieving the promise of transforming finance processes is a data experience platform.Through data experience, users can better gather, organize, extend, and share business data. This data is aggregated from both system data and unstructured sources, like documents and spreadsheets. Unstructured data continues to be a large issue for enterprises.

“Unstructured content represents as much as 80 percent of an organizations total information assets.”31 So, where is this data? Generally, it is hiding in word processing and spreadsheet documents on laptop and desktop computers. It is thus not surprising that “studies show that knowledge workers waste up to 50 percent of time hunting for data, identifying and correcting errors, and seeking confirmatory sources for data they do not trust.”32 The lack of discoverability is a problem. It is made worse when users are unable to understand or trust what is discovered.

Most of an organization’s data is unstructured—rapidly changing and coming from many sources. A modern

finance platform for enterprises must see and handle data relationships in the same way that Google saw and leveraged the power of the relationships between links on the web, and LinkedIn saw the power of networked professionals.

The data experience platform architecture must handle data relationships that are organic and constantly in flux. Those relationships provide new strategic insights and opportunities. A data experience platform enables a business user to bring usable, lightweight structure to the world of unstructured data by creating reusable single-source datasets without the need for IT.

Data experience should define how users interact with data, just like user experience (UX) defines how users interact with applications. Just as a CPM needs a consumer-minded UX that delivers an application closer to TurboTax® than an SAP® software general ledger, a data experience platform needs a way to interact with data relationships that is as easy as Excel,® but with the added control and auditability and lightweight structure that is as easily achieved as hashtagging on Twitter or Instagram.

What the cloud brings to the table for CFOs and CIOs

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Being data driven also means having a view of that information and how it is created and consumed across the enterprise, not just within your operational unit. This is difficult because we don’t all understand how data moves across an enterprise and the implications of additions and changes in data from one system or operational unit to the next.33

As modern finance and operations teams struggle with becoming data-driven to support finance, it is important to understand what constitutes smart data. Smart data is:

• Relevant – Relevant information simply is information that makes a difference, especially with regard to making predictions. If the information can be preceded by “If I only knew that” or followed by “That changes everything,” then likely that point is relevant information.

• Timely – Timeliness is an aspect of relevance.

• Faithful – Faithful information is complete, neutral, and error free.

• Verifiable – The verifiability of information is determined by trying to derive the information by means of several approaches.

• Actionable – Actionable information provides information that is true to what it claims to represent and is deemed beneficial to the information consumer.

• Understandable – With regard to comprehension, the audience matters. As in other professional domains, the information should be understandable by those familiar with the art.

A data experience platform is designed to handle both structured system data and unstructured data and provides a single source of the truth for all as-reported data, or said another way, data that is smart. Because data is global and highly distributed, a data experience platform must:

1. Accept that data is not globally consistent due to a diversity of definitions and structures that can exist within an organization.

2. Track where data has come from and how it was transformed along the way, i.e., its provenance.

3. Provide multi-user controlled access to refine, correct, and add data to the smart dataset.

4. Assure access to a particular version of data or to the most recent version of it.

A data experience platform must provide a true single source for as-reported data across many groups and departments that are traditionally siloed. These groups may include:

• Accounting

• Finance, including FP&A

• Statutory reporting

• Corporate planning

• Sales

• Operations and inventory

• Segment performance (lines of business, subsidiaries, geographies, portfolio companies)

• Enterprise risk management

• Audit reports

As-reported data is assumed to be periodic, whether that report be daily, monthly, quarterly, or annually. A couple examples of reports that rely on as-reported data are quarterly board reports and monthly performance reports.

A quarterly board report would rely on the same as-reported dataset as the quarterly SEC report. This dataset is truly as-reported because data has been aggregated from system data in a general ledger or consolidation application and from unstructured sources groups, such as legal, tax, real estate, or treasury needed for disclosure footnotes. This unstructured data primarily exists in Excel today, but a data experience platform must provide an easy-to-use data collection and aggregation system for these departments to easily use to add smart data to the as-reported dataset.

In addition, the board report requires that a data experience platform can add data from ERM and audit systems into the as-reported dataset for reports to

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audit and risk committees on the board. It is important to note that while a board report and SEC report will rely on the same subset of accounting data, the reports are traditionally presented in different formats—the board report being a combination of presentation and document-style formats, and the SEC report is strictly in document format.

Monthly performance reports provide an integrated approach for reporting across several departments to provide a connected view across accounting, finance, sales, and operations across all lines of business. These reports are usually accompanied with operational review meetings, which is essential for review of business performance for the previous month and also evaluate key risks and opportunities looking forward based, on forecasts and projections.

The repeatable cycle of monthly performance reporting and operation review meetings are critical aspects business process improvements need for modern finance. Decisions and adjustments are made to improve business performance going forward.

Because critical decisions will be made, it is important that the as-reported dataset contains smart data and narrative, which is critical to explain the results and to document decisions and recommendations. To have a true as-reported dataset, explanations, recommendations, and decisions must all roll forward to the next period along with the numerical data. Therefore, narrative is a critical element of an as-reported dataset.

It is important to note that the general ledger or consolidation system does not contain as-reported data for either of the aforementioned reports. Once the data is pulled from these systems, it is common to massage the data for presentation purposes, which includes rounding and additional groupings. In the case of board and SEC reports, rounding must foot within the consolidated financials but also foot with detailed buildup of a consolidated number featured in a detailed disclosure footnote.

In addition, accounting or traditional CPM systems do not include tagging, indexing, searching, or linking of narrative data that is used for financial results

explanation and is coupled to accompanying numerical data. This is one of the key requirements for modern finance and should be provided by any data experience platform. This is further described below.

In order to support modern finance, there are critical functional requirements that a data experience platform must meet. These include:

• Scalable, high performance as-reported datastore for single source of truth

• Data collection subsystem for collection and organizing unstructured data

• Smart documents with flexible linking and query connections for connecting narrative and numerical data

As-reported datastore

Given the issues with Excel® and email collaboration discussed above, one of the key requirements of a data experience platform to support modern finance is to provide a highly scalable, in-memory datasheet, with a powerful calculation engine that allows multi-user access, while providing control with history and audit trail capabilities, all in a secure cloud environment. This datastore should be considered the single source of truth for as-reported data across both system and unstructured data sources. The datastore must support scalability, a calculation engine, and multi-user access,

Scalability

As your organization grows, so too will the expectations that you place on your data experience platform. The next generation of scalable solutions are built using connected micro-services. This multi-service model allows developers to create scale in new directions, deploys new functionality faster, and ensures system resilience in the unlikely event of failures. A micro-service model also allows organizations that develop software to have increased technological diversity—enabling more integration opportunities than their monolithic peers.

In order for datastores to accommodate the needs of a modern business, they need to be crafted on top of in-memory databases rather than flat documents.

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Databases are key for scale, performance, information growth, and the ability to provide context-enablement for your data. In-memory databases in particular allow users to take advantage of massive cloud-computing power to do their work.

Using a database doesn’t have to mean the user experience suffers. An ideal datastore offers the familiarity of a spreadsheet with the scale of performance of a world-class database. Users have become accustomed to the scale limitation and poor performance at the limits of scale from today’s spreadsheets. Those issues become problems of the past with a data experience platform.

Calculation engine

Today’s limits are created when users only have access to do calculations on the computer they were given by IT. Enterprise laptops are powerful machines, but they quickly exceed their performance limits when the data reaches any level of complexity. A decent workhorse laptop or desktop computer typically contains 2–4 cores/processors and around 8GBs of RAM. What if you could, without changing the machine you are reading this on,

get access to machines with orders of magnitude more powerful for your work? That’s exactly the promise of in-memory datastores.

With an in-memory data experience platform, you gain power possessed until only recently by the very few. Calculations no longer need to rely on the number of cores or the amount of available memory your machine processes. In fact, in an ideal scenario, the capability of these systems approaches the infinite.

Collaborative

The days of encountering problems caused by passing versions of files around to collaborate with colleagues are over, or at least they need to be. Collaborators should always share access to the latest data, and they should be able to work on the latest data together. The idea of revisions remains important, but the model has shifted. It’s no longer good enough to collaborate over time, one version of the data at a time. Speed has become such an essential component of the process that you need the ability to work simultaneously. In engineering terms, work has become parallel rather than serial, and that’s a great thing for operational efficiency if you have the right tools.

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Parallel collaboration isn’t the foundation for a blameless environment.The ideal collaborative model must also increase the level of detailed history, authorship awareness, and granularity of changes tracked. Every change, regardless of how minute, should be recorded and ready to be retrieved when needed. Need to understand how a datasheet has evolved over time, or how someone reached a particular conclusion? A core component of a successful datasheet is the ability to understand the data over time.

Connected

Connected, queryable, context-rich data is a core competency of a full-fledged data experience platform. Connecting data between sources across your datasheets, referencing data directly in your finance and process narratives, and consolidating data for management reports are sample use cases of a data experience platform. For example: A data experience platform should enable you to link information from one datasheet or report to another by entering a simple query: “2015Q4Revenue Retention.” Once you report and finalize a number, linking will populate the finalized number across the data experience platform.

When it comes time to roll forward a document, simply change what data you are querying to auto generate a new version of the document. Creating reusable lightweight schemas in this way replaces the need for creating a new document or report every period.

Contextual

Once the as-reported datastore has been established, it is important to embed both meaning and trust in this data to ensure that the dataset meets the definition of smart data. The most advanced way to bring meaning and trust to data is by using semantic tagging. This involves tagging data with terms that themselves are tagged, so that

each term is well defined. Definitions can be concise, without ambiguity, and can even show how terms relate to each other. A common tagging framework for financial reporting is XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) used by the SEC and globally, and inline XBRL, or iXBRL, which is used for tax reporting in the United Kingdom and will soon be adopted by the SEC.

The data experience platform must also provide a way to track and view data lineage of the as-reported datastore. Data lineage should include at a minimum a history of data values by date, where the data is used (which reports), and who has changed the data. An example of data lineage is shown below.

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Both public and private companies have internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR). These controls are the procedures that are designed to reasonably ensure compliances with the company’s polices around financial reporting. For public companies, ICFR is the sole focus of section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

To support internal controls and the audit process (both internal and external), a data experience platform should also provide a mechanism for supporting documentation to be related to data. Supporting documentation is needed to substantiate data used and assertions made in reports. A example of this would be the attachment of a bank statement to substantiate the deposit amount for a given period, or the lease contract to substantiate the lease amount used in a report. An example of attaching supporting documentation to data used in a report can is shown below.

Data request Data compilation Process managementRestricting structural and formula changes—define reference and input cells Aggregating data from multiple sources Process dashboards—visibility into

template and provider status

Indicating requirements for data providers Copying/pasting or rekeying adds risk Administering template permissions

Distributing templates Navigating multiple templates View contributors to aggregations

Changing templates mid cycle Ensuring version control Safeguarding data

Require approvals for data providers Real-time integration with SRSoR datastore Accessing templates remotely

Variance calculation/commentary Real-time updates of sustainability reports Linking data to multiple destinations

Data collection

A data experience platform must provide capabilities to automate manual data collection processes, with the goal of giving teams more time for analysis. Typically, the manual operations of searching, collecting, aggregating, and managing the data providers—sometimes hundreds of people—takes up most of the finance and accounting teams’ time, leaving little time for analysis and strategic interpretation.

To achieve this goal, a data collection system should bring a nimble structure to the world of unstructured data by providing:

• Collection templates that can be developed by business users, not the IT department

• Automatic consolidation of information from various sources and global teams

• Automatic roll up and aggregation across data providers’ submissions

• Seamless integration into the as-reported datastore

• Visibility and oversight of the entire collection process

The key functionality of a data collection application for unstructured sustainability data is listed in the following table.

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Smart documents

A data experience platform cannot stop with data collection and an as-reported datastore. As mentioned above, it is important that the as-reported dataset also contain narrative, because it is critical to explain the business results and also to document decisions and recommendations. Smart connections, from data to documents and presentations, can combine numbers and narrative to provide the deep context needed for true business understanding.

These smart documents are authored in a repeatable reporting framework app described below, and combine narrative and numbers in the as-reported dataset. This combination is needed to achieve the strategic promise of performance reporting as described by Gartner.

Consumerization and collaboration have also begun to transform traditional management accounting reports into new performance playbooks that provide an integrated approach to results explanation, showing the interconnectivity of operational and financial results within the enterprise. This SCPM capability takes up where traditional management reporting and disclosure reporting leave off.

Data is scattered throughout financial and performance reports in tables, charts, and paragraphs, with data usages being repeated across multiple reports.

The source values for all these usages can change frequently during the document drafting process, which underscores the importance of having a single source as-reported datastore where these changes occur and the usages can be updated via smart connections. Imagine if you could change a piece of data one time and have it updated instantly in all reports—monthly performance reports, budget and planning reports, quarterly board committee reports, risk scorecards, and SEC filings.

A data experience platform must provide resilient data-linking technology to provide the smart connections that allow any changes to source values to automatically sync impacted data in tables or text references throughout all affected documents, presentations, and workbooks in real time.

An audit trail of any changes to data values should also be trackable in a data lineage view. Supporting documentation uploaded to a digital support binder could be attached to data links that support internal audit and external assurance.

The appearance and formatting of the impacted data usages must be allowed to change without changing the underlying data value. For example, two numbers can be linked to the same data, but one number can appear in text as “$1.2 billion” while another can appear in a table as $”1,200,000 (reported in thousands)”.

Repeatable reporting framework To author “smart documents” within the data experience platform, a repeatable reporting framework is required. This combination is truly unique to finance and is instrumental in providing the reports needed for rapid decision making to support modern finance initiatives.

Most modern finance reports cannot be generated from an ERP or consolidation system as a canned report. These can be complex reports that contain narrative, data, and graphics. They are developed through a collaborative process of data analysis, filtering and curation, strategic interpretation, and authoring by a team of individuals that may span the globe. Furthermore, these reports have embedded strategic insight that is connected to the as-reported datastore.

Data may be visualized in tables or charts and may also be scattered throughout paragraphs. To further complicate things, the same data values are typically repeated throughout the report making it very difficult to update if the single source value changes. In addition, several reports may be using the same set of data.

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• A repeatable reporting framework for performance reporting must provide:

• An environment where multiple users can edit the document at the same time without version control issues

• Both document and presentation formats, including charts, that can be linked to the as-reported datastore

• Table templates designed for accounting and finance formatting

• A full audit trail to track all submitted updates from any user

• Permissions that can be used to control access to the document

at both overall document level and the individual section level

• Task assignment to manage input from all involved parties across the enterprise

• Blackline reports that enable reviewers to see changes between revisions

A repeatable reporting framework must allow multiple authors and analysts to work in the documents, workbooks, or presentations at the same time. However, control is paramount as users shouldn’t have to concern themselves with manual version control. Track changes can also be used with teams so it is easy to see changes made by certain contributors. Permissions should be available to determine what users can accept certain changes in the documents.

A full audit trail of any author’s changes must be stored and comparisons between different versions, or blacklines, should be supported. An easy-to-use permission model that doesn’t require IT administrators should be available to control access to documents, sections of documents, and slide groups for only the necessary authors or reviewers. A full commenting system should allow commentary by other authors and reviewers, including directing comments to other users for their attention. Other users should be able to reply to these comments on discussion threads, and comment filtering should be enabled to filter comments by author, topic, or priority.

Digital review and mobile access The distribution of reports for review is often overlooked. A repeatable reporting framework application for authoring smart documents should provide digital review facilities, where drafts can be distributed to different review groups with the workflow being managed by the authoring team.

Comments from reviewers should automatically be aggregated and displayed in the authoring environment, so authors can efficiently manage and address comments. By automatically aggregating comments into one editing view, the author can immediately address redundant or conflicting feedback.

A performance reporting system should also support the review of multiple document types including PDFs of fully designed report layouts. An electronic books manager should be included, so multiple file types can be easily aggregated into one environment. This book can be distributed to review groups who can comment on designed files and other graphics. Sending digital reports and books to a mobile tablet viewer or desktop viewer is more secure than email or hard copy reports. The books can also be electronically distributed for board committee and other oversight meetings where committee members can add bookmarks and comments.

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SummaryThis white paper has defined the modern finance initiative for businesses, outlined the key business imperatives for modern finance, discussed technology shortfalls with an emphasis on desktop spreadsheets, and put forward the software platform requirements required for modern finance.

The most important modern finance business imperative is the adoption of weekly and monthly performance reporting and integrated monthly management reviews. To support this imperative, desktop spreadsheets must be removed from collaborative processes and replaced with a new cloud-based software platform.

Modern finance software solutions form the new breed of performance reporting with the goal of enabling business process improvements for rapid and informed decision making.

A software platform for performance reporting provides the solution needed for weekly and monthly reports across multiple departments combining numbers and narrative for deeper context and business insight. These reports form the backbone of weekly and monthly team and executive reviews.

Wdesk from Workiva provides a modern finance platform for performance reporting. The Wdesk platform provides:

• A data experience platform and repeatable reporting framework combining numbers and narrative

• Improved control of processes to mitigate corporate risk

• A secure cloud-based platform for finance, internal controls, and risk

For more information on Wdesk, visit workiva.com.

About the authorsStuart Miller

Stuart Miller is Executive Vice President, Treasurer, and Chief Financial Officer at Workiva. Prior to Workiva, Stuart was a managing director of Colonnade Advisors, a mergers and acquisitions advisory firm that he founded in 1999. Previously, he was a managing director in the investment banking department of J.P. Morgan. Stuart joined J.P. Morgan from Credit

Suisse First Boston, where he had worked in the investment banking department. He has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Mike Rost

Mike Rost is a key contributor to product strategy at Workiva and works with business leaders in the areas of governance, risk, and compliance. With more than 20 years of experience assisting organizations with using technology to optimize business processes, Mike has an extensive background in internal audit, risk management, and advising compliance

professionals. He has been active in industry associations, including the Open Compliance and Ethics Group and the Institute of Internal Auditors. Mike is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences on subjects such as risk best practices, guidance on the implementation of audit, and risk and compliance technology. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics and an MBA in marketing and finance from the University of Minnesota.

About Workiva

Workiva (NYSE:WK) created Wdesk, a cloud-based productivity platform for enterprises to collect, link, report, and analyze business data with control and accountability. Thousands of organizations, including over 65% of the 500 largest U.S. corporations by total revenue, use Wdesk. For more information, visit workiva.com.

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4 Ibid., p.4

5 Ibid., p.4

6 Ibid., p.4

7 Ibid., p.4

8 Ibid., p.4

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10 Ibid

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13 Ibid

14 Ibid., p.4

15 Ibid., p.6

16 "CFO Insights: What's keeping CFOs up in 2014?" (2014). Deloitte. Retrieved from http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ie/Documents/Finance/CFO/deloitte-ireland-cfo-insights-2014.pdf

17 Bardwick, Peter, John Dunican, Jeremy Sucharski. "The CFO's 10-Step Guide to Sleeping the First Year After Ringing the Bell." Armanino LLP. Retrieved from http://www.armaninollp.com/articles/white-paper---the-cfos-10-step-guide-to-sleep-the-first-year-after-ringing-the-bell

18 Ibid

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23 Kucera, Danielle, Miles Weiss. "Google Blames R.R. Donnelley for Premature Earnings Release." (2012). Bloomberg. Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-18/google-blames-r-r-donnelly-for-early-earnings-statement-release

24 Ibid., p.10

25 Webster, Melissa. "How Enterprising Companies Are Moving Business Reporting to the Cloud." (2014). International Data Corporation. Retrieved from https://www.workiva.com/sites/workiva/files/pdfs/thought-leadership/idc-how-enterprising-companies-are-moving-business-reporting-to-the-cloud.pdf

26 Olshan, Jeremy. "88% of Spreadsheets have Errors." (2013). The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch.com Retrieved from http://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-errors-2013-04-17

27 Ibid., p.10

28 Ibid., p.10

29 Van Decker, John E., Christopher Iervollino. "The Breakup of the CPM Suite." (2015). Gartner Inc. Retrieved from https://www.gartner.com/doc/3101017/breakup-cpm-suite

30 Granetto, Bianca Francesca, Chad Eschinger, Joanne M. Correia, Laurie F. Wurster. "Shift On-Premises Offerings to Cloud-Based SaaS Primer for 2016." (2016). Gartner Inc. Retrieved from https://www.gartner.com/doc/3188928/shift-onpremises-offerings-cloudbased-saas

31 Stewart, Darin. "Big Content: The Unstructured Side of Big Data." (2013). Gartner, Inc. Retrieved from http://blogs.gartner.com/darin-stewart/2013/05/01/big-content-the-unstructured-side-of-big-data/

32 Redman, Thomas C. "Data's Credibility Problem." Harvard Business Review. (2013). Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2013/12/datas-credibility-problem/ar/1

33 O'Neal, Kelle. "Bridge the CxO Gap with a Data-Driven Approach." (2016). Data Informed. Retrieved from http://data-informed.com/bridge-the-cxo-gap-with-a-data-driven-approach

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Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. TurboTax is a registered trademark and/or registered service marks of Intuit Inc., or one of its subsidiaries, in the United States and other countries. SAP software is the trademark or registered trademark of SAP SE in Germany and in several other countries.