Exposing the Skeletons in Your Closet

The Halloween season is spooky enough without being frightened on the job. We get that.

Yet, we’re taking this time of ghouls and goblins to address the skeleton(s) in the room. That being the unflattering aspects of your revenue data, polices and what-not yanked from the cobweb-filled depths of your old processes into the glare of broad daylight for all to see when implementing a new revenue automation solution such as RevPro.

We’ve heard this from more than a few customers, though couched as a short-term frustration that morphed into a long-term gain. It’s an aspect of our solution we don’t shy away from and instead lean into with gusto as one of the intrinsic benefits of our market-leading revenue cycle automation software.

“Shadow IT, desktop databases, and people-dependent processes are just a few skeletons lurking in the recesses of complex organizations,” said one longtime accounting consultant with countless man hours in the field.” These processes are not typically unearthed until an internal transformation initiative or external regulatory requires a detailed end-to-end understanding of current state. 

Swift and successful deployment of a new revenue accounting solution often comes down to data integrity. Is your data in the best shape it can be? If not, what will it take to get there?

Another revenue consultant we spoke with highlighted a few of the more common scenarios he’s run into at the beginning of engagements with companies for the purpose of working on their revenue recognition processing. This is an activity in the midst of a significant ramp-up as organizations seek to address the looming new revenue recognition guidance.

1) The ‘do it all manually’ scenario with endless spreadsheets built over many years which nobody dares to question or change because ‘this is how we’ve been doing it for all these years.’

2) The situation in which nobody knows how to have key data elements flow down to the revenue recognition process and instead of looking into the root cause so data can automatically populate the revenue recognition entries, the choice is made to manually capture data under business intelligence after booking the entries in finance.

3) Then there’s the manual allocation route: Why have automatic rules to allocate revenue in different segments and dimensions when you could have a multitude of staffers do it manually? (with sarcasm fully intact here)

Yes, there is work involved in getting things corrected, unfortunately. There’s really no way around that.

You may not be thinking it at the time, amid all that grumbling, but we believe you’ll be a happy customer in the end after those ghoulish portions of your process are identified and corrected.

As yet another revenue professional shared with us, “Defects in upstream processes result in bad data and additional work for the revenue accounting team to correct system-generated entries each month.

“Implementing RevPro exposes the upstream process defects and the need to resolve them to smooth the processing and shorten the close cycle for revenue accounting,” he said.

Hopefully, we didn’t frighten you off.

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