With 2022 coming to a close and 2023 beginning, the combination of agile short-term planning and strategic long-term forecasting is critical to the success of any company. Finance leaders should be busy making new plans and optimizing existing ones in order to stay competitive and increase revenue. It’s never too early to prepare after all!
Finance checklists are a useful tool to help you stay on course when getting ready for a successful year ahead. Gartner has laid out a set of predictions and priorities for finance teams which you can use to see how you’re measuring up. Try to keep the following points in mind when creating your own rebate management “to-do” list.
Finding: Many projects slated five years out or more are being moved closer due to lack of capabilities with current applications.
☐ Plan now to modernize existing rebate management solutions.
☐ Begin with a lower-risk pilot project that can deliver quick benefits and solidify organizational support.
☐ Engage a project champion (e.g., CFO) to drive your rebate management project.
Finding: Organizations have found that the move from on-premises to cloud solutions is typically not a simple technical upgrade. It represents an opportunity to redefine and transform their finance organization.
☐ Determine how your current rebate management capabilities align with business requirements.
☐ Build a strong business case for a SaaS rebate management solution that includes benefits and addresses company KPIs.
☐ Examine the “process side” of rebate management, highlighting what needs to change to truly transform the finance organization.
☐ Build talent and capabilities within the business to support the new SaaS rebate management solution.
Finding: As business needs change, finance organizations must deliver innovation quicker.
☐ Train or source new talent to accelerate innovation.
☐ Determine your readiness today, future appetite, funding and availability of project resources to have a successful rebate management system implementation.
☐ Plan in a collaborative, agile and accurate manner in order to pivot quickly.
Finding: Many have often found their legacy solutions to be too IT-reliant and a hindrance to enterprise collaboration within finance departments and other finance areas.
☐ Reflect on the ways in which your current legacy system for rebate management is holding you back and the risks of failing to take action.
☐ Consider implementing a new rebate management solution that is hosted in the cloud, delivering centralized and up-to-date information, modern user experience, best practice workflows, lower cost of ownership, reduced reliance on IT, and onward innovation and upgrades.
☐ Evaluate current collaboration processes and suggest new ways of working across the company.
Finding: Finance has been trying to move from a “traditional transaction processor” to a more value-adding “business partner” by being able to provide more insights through timely analytics.
☐ Communicate to stakeholders what the vision for the office of finance is.
☐ Become that value-added partner to the business.
☐ Set specific guidelines on where finance staff spend their time.
☐ Recruit staff in critical roles with the necessary level of experience, leadership mind-sets, and authority to influence the business.
Finding: Many financial processes and solutions have grown overly complicated in feature and function due to decades of use and without a review of their processes.
☐ Compare the gaps between your current situation and your ideal one, focusing on the specific rebate processes that can be improved.
☐ Make a plan to move from manual rebate processes to an automated rebate management system.
☐ Eliminate the complicated aspects from your day-to-day finance functions.
Are you ticking off all the boxes?
This finance checklist for rebate management provides a detailed overview of what your finance team should consider going into 2023. This is by no means an exhaustive finance checklist, but it will set you on track to meet and exceed your organizational goals for 2023, and beyond. If you’re ticking off fewer boxes than you thought, no need to worry as you don’t have to look far to find a solution that will reshape your rebate management needs. See how Enable can help streamline your entire rebate management process from start to finish.
