Improve Visibility Into Delinquent Tasks Through Automated Workflow Management

CadencyDirect and ServiceNow Offer New Workflow Management Options to Prevent Delinquency

As painful as it is to admit, no business always runs at 100 percent. Bottlenecks occur both upstream and downstream; slowdowns happen when documents are received late; employees sometimes miss work unexpectedly due to illness or other emergencies. Put simply, life happens during business hours.

Agile organizations have backup plans and contingencies in place to overcome these complications in workflow management, but what happens when a roadblock or a bottleneck doesn’t get properly communicated? Late work cannot be addressed if leadership isn’t aware of it, and a lack of visibility can turn a slowdown into a dead stop.

To keep a clean bill of financial health, senior finance leadership, governance, and internal audit teams need to be immediately notified of delinquent tasks and issues to allow for oversight and follow-up. However, this can’t happen if an organization’s plans for digital transformation don’t include the necessary finance functions like the month-end close.

Even the most forward-thinking businesses rely on outdated tools to support the financial close process—tools like spreadsheets and point solutions that haven’t kept up with the demands of today’s digital focus. F&A teams that are disconnected from the rest of the business can struggle to support organizational needs and even slow down growth opportunities.

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New bidirectional functionality between CadencyDirect and ServiceNow eliminates visibility blocks.

The Office of Finance can overcome these issues with the seamless integration between ServiceNow and CadencyDirect. With the release of CadencyDirect 2.0, the appropriate personnel can be made aware of financial close issues and late tasks systematically through ServiceNow’s workflow management options that trigger based on the organization’s configured SLAs in CadencyDirect.

This means that, through CadencyDirect, managers and controllers within the escalation path are made aware of an issue as it occurs in real time, along with the nature of the issue. Perhaps there is a requirement that needs to be addressed, such as acquiring documentation from a team outside the Office of Finance. From directly within ServiceNow, the escalation owner can see the created task, drill down into its specifics, and then route to the appropriate team, without ever having to log into CadencyDirect. ServiceNow’s sophisticated workflow management creates an automated, auditable task stream that makes its way back to CadencyDirect once the necessary documentation has been retrieved.

“With this release, we are helping F&A teams continue to achieve enhanced visibility and control of critical financial data in order to handle risk with confidence. With these new bi-directional workflows, ServiceNow customers are positioned to reduce complexity and risk, accelerate the overall process, and drive a greater experience for their teams.” – Michael Ross, Chief Product Officer, Trintech

CadencyDirect’s System of Controls can also alert teams when tasks become late. If a Close Task Action Plan (CTAP) or Close Task Issue Action Plan (CTIAP) remains incomplete after a certain amount of time has passed, a workflow alert is automatically triggered by the SLAs that have been configured. Rather than having to wait for a status update meeting or month-end review to discover that something has fallen behind or slipped through the cracks, managers and controllers find out immediately. Best of all, what they’re made aware of, and when, is completely automated, removing the potential for human error.

Eliminate everyday headaches through streamlined workflow management

This level of integration allows for exception management without the headache of logging into multiple platforms or hopping from solution to solution. Exceptions inevitably occur, but automated workflows specific to the needs of the Office of Finance provide visibility for F&A teams to ensure completeness in the financial close, while also seamlessly connecting to teams across the organization to drive a more efficient process.

To learn more about the benefits that ServiceNow and CadencyDirect can bring to your business, contact us for a demo.

Written by: Nathan Stabenfeldt