The basics of Digital Finance

I am addressing this article to all the finance and accounting professionals like accountants, FP&A specialists, finance managers and directors, CFOs.

From small to large companies, digitalization in 2024 and beyond is inevitable. Digital Finance differs from day to day operations. It has its own characteristics, and one must be prepared to implement a new digital solution.

You are about to start or you already in the process of financial digitalization such ERP, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics or Automation. Without much experience in this sphere, we may not be always confident about what is next.

No worries, this article will help you to understand the basics. What? Why? Who? And how?

Let’s start to set the scene to understand what a digital / technological project is for financial departments?

A digital project aims to implement a tool, a solution such as an ERP, software, robotics and automation, artificial intelligence (which has been in the spotlight lately), mainly focusing on digitizing and facilitating the processing of financial and accounting information for internal and external needs of any organization.

For example, your finance department plans to implement Oracle or SAP.

As we continue, have you communicated to your teams the objectives and benefits for Digital Finance?

From experience, here is the usual top 3 reasons to do so:

• Streamline and simplify the processing of financial and accounting information using the latest technologies as leverage. For example, all the company’s teams use on a common tool.
• Save time by automating manual tasks or having little added value. For example, we can automate the process of recording accounting invoices and thus focus on analysis.
• Centralize and make reliable the financial information used for the company (reporting for the management) or other organizations (Tax administration, auditors ...). This may allow us to restrict the use of Excel files outside the system, does that sound familiar to you?

Now, you may ask yourself:  Who will take part in the project? Do we have enough human resources to implement a digital project?

Setting up a project team is one of the crucial steps for success. The roles and responsibilities of clearly defined and communicated.

Depending on the size of your project, the size of your team will vary. The project teams can combine both internal and external stakeholders. Here is a list of the common participants in digital initiatives:

• The project manager to coordinate the actions;
• The Experts (also called SME for Subject Matter Expert) who have in-depth knowledge of their day-to-day activities, validate future features;
• Contributors who bring their experience, test the future solution;

• The IT teams in charge of the technological developments of the target solution.
• The Sponsors to guarantee general progress and validate important decisions.
• The External stakeholder such as a technological integrator, external consultants to strengthen internal teams, a lawyer / a tax specialist to validate legal aspects…;
• All users of the future technology.

Once the first steps of your digitalization take shape, you may wonder : what will be the steps to implement a new technology. Let me summarize the biggest milestones too give you an overview.

1. Prepare the project. It includes preparing the objectives, setting up the project team, assessing the needs for human resources, planning and budgeting.
2. Analyze the completeness all accounting and financial activities and processes (ex: fixed assets process, VAT management, receivables, payables…).
3. Define the business requirements based on the previous analysis.
4. Select the technology based on the feasibility of the requirements.
5. Customize and / or develop the target solution.
6. Test and validate the solution.
7. Train the final users.
8. Deploy the new digital solution, control and monitor.

This article gives you a first overview for any finance or accounting professional who is involved in the process of digitalization.

Feel free to write any question below and I will be glad to answer.

Thank you for reading.

Digital and Finance

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