Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics for Your Financial Close

The financial closing process is often a blur with little time to consider measuring the results and areas that need process improvements or may indicate a financial statement fraud.  Financial statements are the ultimate scorecard for a company. A company's financial statements reflect the company's business results and trends, its products, services, and macro-fundamental events. There is a competing demand for improved financial governance and increased transparency and reliability of data.  Finance and accounting organizations need to proactively manage the challenges of data quality and prepare for new regulatory requirements to avoid creating a “perfect storm” for their financial close and consolidation processes. How can these challenges be tackled in a concise and predictable manner? We’ll look at both the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) needed to measure the closing process as well as the metrics that can analyze your financial statements and indicate anomalies.

Learning Objectives: 

• We’ll define the key components of a governance process for your financial close that will reduce surprises and improve predictability.
• Attendees will learn how KPIs and metrics can help to identify process improvements and areas for automation.
• Attendees will learn the differences between operational metrics and financial statement metrics and the need for both.

Attendees will obtain examples of scorecards for the financial close.

Chris Doxey, CAPP, CCSA, CICA, CPC, President, Doxey Inc., Paeonian Springs, VA

Chris Doxey is an author, speaker and management consultant who is passionate about improving financial process.Chris focuses on internal controls, process transformation and automation. She has extensive experience with trade directories, metrics and analytics and self-audit tools.

Chris spent more than25 years at Hewlett Packard and Verizon in senior P2P, logistics, and finance andaccounting leadership positions.Chris held executive positions with global P2P audit firms for eight years.During her eight years of management consulting experience, Chris designed a new fiscal closing process for a large enterprise, implemented a self-audit tool for a global P2P audit firm. Chrisdeveloped the requirements for a trade directory and drove theimplementation process for a global financial institution. As an example of her process transformation work, Chris worked with a large university to improve internal controls and implement automated account payable processes. She also develops educational content for several P2P solution providers.

Chris works with the riskcloud product team at Oracle where she developed the initial set of automated P2P controls and collaborates with the Oracle team on a frequent basis to discuss improvements. She is a long-time speaker at Oracle’s Open World conferences.She leads the risk advisory practice for an Oracle partner and supports the implementation of risk cloud for large enterprise clients. 

Chris is acertified accounts payable professional (CAPP) and holdsa certification in controls self-assessments (CSA). She is a certified professional controller (CPC) and a certified internal controls auditor (CICA). Chris holds a BA, BS, MBA, and a graduate certificate in project management. Chris is a member of the Institute for Internal Controls (IIC), the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). She is onthe advisory board for the IIC and the Exchange Summit.Chris is the author of The Internal Controls Toolkit and The Fiscal Close Toolkit published by Wiley in 2019. The Controller’s Toolkit and The AP Toolkit will be published in 2021.