Accenture: Accentuating digital transformation with cloud-based and AI-driven capabilities to enhance finance processes

Accenture plc is a well-known Fortune Global 500 company offering diverse professional services to more than 9,000 customers across 120 countries. With US$65 billion in annual revenue and 850-plus company codes across 59 locations, it had to manage finance processes across large-scale operations in multiple legal entities and geographies.

The consultancy was issuing roughly 990,000 client invoices each year, and a substantial number of these payments were late. Globally, it was closing its books in five days (with preclose available in two days), but there was pressure to accelerate the close cycle to three days. Month-end was often challenging due to missing customer information and different reporting numbers. Its invoice-to-cash process had more than 1,000 variants, with almost 11% variance in the timing between a debit memo and invoice creation, which could take from one to six days. Furthermore, its auto-clear rate ranged from 0% in Brazil to around 25% in the Nordic countries, and it became difficult to keep up with its rules-based configuration as the organization continued to grow.

Accenture’s complex IT landscape comprised more than 150 direct integrations with SAP software systems and 350 downstream applications. It was using manual, siloed processes that led to inefficiencies, and its visibility into these inefficiencies and into optimization opportunities was limited.

The company’s finance function focuses on driving value across the organization, from its foundational operational teams to its high-impact strategic support groups. To elevate performance in achieving stronger business outcomes, it wanted to unleash human potential by combining digital tools and data with human insight. To this end, it sought to simplify and standardize its processes globally to create a more agile, consistent, and scalable finance function.