The Paper Chase: 45% of Finance Time Goes to Collecting Data

It is a Monday morning. You need to know your state of affairs across your Australian, Singapore, and Hong Kong entities before a board call at noon.

You open the Australian banking portal. Then the Singapore one. Then you wait for the spreadsheet from the Hong Kong accounts team, sent on Friday, reflecting Thursday's position. By the time you have assembled the picture, two hours have passed. The numbers you are looking at no longer match the current moment.

There is a multi-step sequence most global finance teams run before every significant decision: a round of platforms, card dashboards, and ERP exports, each an extra stop between the data and the decision. By the time you have a complete view, the business has moved on. 

The problem is not that finance lacks data. It’s that the data is disjointed across a fragmented infrastructure.

What causes a data delay?

Data delays rarely come from one broken process. They build up when the numbers live in too many places, exceptions only surface after the fact, and every entity has its own way of reporting the truth.

1. First, finance teams spend too much time getting the numbers into a usable state. Research from FP&A Trends found that 45% of finance team time is spent on data collection and validation, not analysis, forecasting or advising the business. That time is lost before the real finance work can begin.

2. Second, not every cost is visible when it happens. Outstanding expense claims, late submissions and international card fees can sit outside the live view of the business until finance manually chases, reconciles or reviews them. By then, the decision window has often passed.

3. Third, the operating model gets more complex as the business grows. According to IDC, 51% of finance leaders at global organisations name multiple ERPs and disconnected systems as a top challenge to their FP&A function. Each entity may have its own banking relationship, card programme, approval flow or reporting process, which adds another stop before finance can see the full picture.

The result is a finance team that has the information somewhere, but not in one place, not in real time, and not in a format that supports fast decisions. That is why what looks like a process issue is often an infrastructure issue.

The infrastructure problem disguised as a process problem

A finance team does not log into five portals every morning because it is disorganised. It does so because each entity was built with its own system, and no single platform ever underpinned it all. The tools accumulated over time, one per market, one per compliance requirement, one per banking relationship, and the finance team inherited the work of reconciling them. Every entity added to the business added another stop to the route, another handoff before the complete picture was available.

When the problem is treated as a process issue, the fixes tend to be procedural: earlier cut-offs, more reminders, tighter submission rules, extra reporting steps. Those may help at the edges, but they do not change the underlying route the data has to take. If spend, approvals, card activity and entity-level reporting still sit across separate systems, finance is still left stitching the view together manually.

Hiring a bigger finance team does not solve the infrastructure problem. It just gives you more people doing the same manual work.

What a consolidated view actually changes

A unified view of global finance does not only reduce the time finance teams spend gathering data. It changes what is visible and when.

When card spend, bank balances, and entity-level approvals exist on a shared platform, budget overruns surface in real time rather than in the next reporting cycle. An approval policy set at the parent level cascades to every entity without duplication. International card spend is visible by entity, by currency, by card, tracked against budget as it happens rather than discovered at reconciliation. The route from spend to decision gets shorter because the data no longer has to travel between systems before it reaches the people who need it.

Rodd & Gunn the luxury menswear brand with 500+ employees and 77 stores worldwide, faced this problem at scale. Their finance team was managing dozens of corporate cards split across AMEX and a separate expense platform, with receipt retention sitting at 70% and month-end reports that could not be configured to match their financial year. 

After consolidating onto a unified spend management platform, receipt retention reached close to 100% and reconciliation became, in their finance team's words, "really accurate information" produced without the manual effort. 

The principle holds at any scale. What matters is not the number of entities. It is whether the platform running beneath them was designed for the whole picture, or assembled from components each built for something smaller. One platform means one clear path to the numbers, without the extra stops in between.

The CFOs who are never surprised already know this

The businesses that have closed this gap are not better resourced or more sophisticated than those still assembling the picture manually. They made a different infrastructure decision, unlocking real-time visibility across entities as a baseline expectation rather than a quarterly exercise.

A finance team with a complete view before 9am does not spend Monday morning assembling yesterday's numbers. It spends it advising the business on what’s happening right now.

• FP&A Trends Survey 2024 - https://fpa-trends.com/sites/default/files/docs/FPA-Trends-Survey-2024.pdf

• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Analytics and AI Business Process Services for Finance and Accounting (2024) - https://www.genpact.com/content/dam/genpact/web/documents/IDC_MarketScape_Worldwide_Enterprise_Analytics_and_AI_Business_Process_Services_for_Finance_and_Accounting_2024.pdf