Thinking

Here you’ll find our opinions, viewpoints and rants. But don’t forget to add your comments – good or bad – on anything you like or loathe. We value your feedback.

Excel Heaven & Excel Hell; What Fuels Our Addiction?
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spreadsheets“Excel: We can’t live without it, yet we are fast coming to the realisation that we can’t live with it either…” Robert Gothan, Financial Director.

When it works, Excel is an incredibly powerful, simple yet sophisticated tool. However, when it …

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The Future of the Finance Function
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“The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be” (in the finance function!)

The champion baseball player, Yogi Berra, who died this year, left a great legacy in his pearls of unwitting philosophic wisdom.

A fitting way to set the tone …

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SAP GRC 2015 “Between a rock and a hard place”
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Our COO, Hans van Nes, attended the recent SAP sponsored Governance, Risk and Compliance conference (GRC2015) in Nice, France. His review forms the latest guest post, and I am reliably informed that the title refers to observations from the conference …

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How leading finance functions are redefining excellence
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PwC’s Global Finance Benchmark Report 2015 is the latest in a series of reports for finance leaders and is an excellent combination of a status update on the changes in the role, performance, governance, structure and mandate for the finance …

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Building the case for your Business Process Transaction Monitoring CCM strategy
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Continuous Controls Monitoring, Transaction Monitoring and Data Analytics are all related terms for techniques that help assure the operation of core business processes and identify exceptions to policy or expected norms to help drive incremental improvement. Some organisations have had …

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More ERP users get benefit of advanced Continuous Controls Monitoring and Data Analytics capabilities
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On the heels of capabilities for finance and ERP applications such as SAP ECC, HANA, SRM, CRM, Oracle R12, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Lawson, SunSystems, Microsoft Dynamics and Infor LN. Consider Solutions share their experiences and capabilities for continuous monitoring and …

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Global Process Owners and Getting ‘More-for-Less’ in Finance Shared Services
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Arguably the cost of the typical finance function has halved over the last two decades, during which time expectations from the business have almost doubled. A series of transformation programs have implemented ERP systems, established shared services centres (SSCs) …

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Don’t Trust Your Instinct: The Perils of Thinking Fast
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I’m very pleased to welcome a guest blog post, written today by Julia Biedry. As a keen fan of Daniel Kahneman’s work, Julia has chosen to delve a bit into the psychology behind important business decisions…

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From grade school up …

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The ‘F Word’ & Smart Data Analytics
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The 'F Word' and Smart Data Analytics

The ‘F Word’ is enough to get people quite agitated in any discussion. Particularly when it relates to our business processes . . .Yep, I’m talking about Fraud.

We all know it happens, but not in our companies.

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5 Opportunities: Financial Control Best Practice with COSO 2013
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This is an excerpt from a recent white paper:

The recent 2013 update of the Internal Control Framework issued by the COSO was a major event followed by standard setters and publicly held companies. The original COSO framework

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