Your long-suffering accounting department will love you to the moon and back for this one. Implement the ServiceNow® Finance Close Automation (FCA), a new application in the New York release, and suddenly their job will get a lot easier.
Finance Close Automation provides workflows and automation to accelerate your finance close processes and reduce your finance close risks. The FCA application simplifies the accounting and finance close process for your organization. Your accounting team can post journal entries, manage timelines for close tasks, and perform end-to-end accounting procedures in a centralized location.
How Finance Close Automation Simplifies Repetitive Work
Close Task Management
Create a workbook for an accounting period, add close tasks in it, and define dependencies between tasks. Since finance close is a repetitive process, you only need to create the workbook once for the first period. After that, you can just duplicate the prior period workbook.
Close Management Portal for Managing Finance Close
Track and manage your tasks for an accounting period at a single location, from the Close Management Portal. From there, you can view the close progress at the user level, function level, or finance organization level and see and address bottlenecks and overdue activities. The data that you see in the portal depends on your role.
Integration with GRC Policy and Compliance
Reduce your finance close risks by integrating with the GRC Policy and Compliance application. With this integration, you can manage and monitor whether SOX policies, SOPs, and Controls are in compliance and you can sign-off on control attestations. This integration also expedites the audit cycle by automating the evidence collection process.
Automated Journal Entries with Real-Time ERP Integration (SAP and Oracle)
Configure FCA to integrate with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to automate journal entries in real time. For example, you can:
- Post journal entries into your ERP system
- Reverse journal entries in the ERP system
- Automatically reverse accruals in the ERP system
- Assign recurring close tasks to be automatically accrued each period
FCA supports multi-ERP integrations in a single instance. In the New York release, integration with SAP and Oracle ERP systems is available.
FCA provides a generic way to define header and line templates. With this, FCA supports different journal entry templates for different ERPs or it can support a different template for each function within an ERP.
Customizations using FCA Extension Points
Implement customizations without altering the base code when you use FCA extension points.
Easy Configuration with Guided Setup
Configure FCA on your instance by using the Finance Close Automation Guided Setup. The Guided Setup provides a sequence of tasks that help you with the configuration.
Application-specific Admin Role
FCA uses application administration and Finance close admin (sn_fcms.finance_close_admin) as the application-specific admin role.
Quick Start Tests for FCA
Validate the continued functionality of FCA after any configuration change such as an upgrade or after developing an application. All test suites and tests should pass on a default implementation. To validate a custom implementation, copy the automated tests and configure them for your customizations.
Related ServiceNow Applications and Features
Planned Task_v2
The plugin (com.snc.planned_task_v2) enables task management and opening of the Planning Console in FCA.
Fiscal Calendar
FCA requires the Fiscal Calendar application to create fiscal calendars with defined fiscal periods such as one month long, four weeks long, Q1 2019, or July 2019.
GRC: Policy and Compliance Management
The store application provides a centralized process for creating and managing policies, standards, and internal control procedures that are cross-mapped to external regulations and practices. FCA integrates with GRC to reduce finance close risks.
