First of all, let's understand the concept of financial sharing center:
Traditionally, the greatest value of financial sharing center is to realize centralized financial accounting.
The financial sharing center came into being in foreign countries, and its core is to keep accounts and report the accounting business of enterprises scattered in different entities and regions in a unified way, which not only ensures the standardization and unification of accounting records and statements, but also saves system and labor costs. Therefore, it is generally considered as a management method that can effectively improve efficiency and cut costs.
When building a sharing center, general enterprises often take "creating and sharing" as their value goal. However, with the development of information technology, the arrival of internet plus era, and the increasingly obvious trend of financial transformation from accounting to management, financial sharing, as the "cornerstone" of the application of management accounting, is facing a comprehensive refresh of its positioning and value.
Secondly, let's take a look at the development process of shared service centers:
The global shared service center has gone through several important stages: the shared center driven by the change of organizational process in the era of computerized accounting; The sharing center driven by internet technology in the period of accounting networking and the sharing center driven by artificial intelligence technology in the period of accounting intelligence.
The early sharing center in Europe and America was driven by the change of organizational process. It has realized the organizational process from decentralization to centralization, from disunity to a certain degree of standards and norms. Later, with the development of technology, especially the development of network technology, we realized a networked information system from the past single-machine financial system.
Now, we have reached a new node, which is this round of artificial intelligence technology. Even though all countries established financial sharing in the early days, some financial sharing centers in Europe and America have developed for more than 20 years, or even longer, but at present they are upgrading the sharing centers and discussing how to transform the traditional sharing centers with new technologies. At this time node, China and other countries are on the same starting line, and the direction of thinking and research is the same.
Third, shared service centers and organizational changes in the digital age;
At the same time, the shared service center is closely related to this round of changes in the environment. In the process of digital transformation, many enterprises not only pay attention to property, but also consider the digital transformation of the whole enterprise, especially the traditional management system and mode. For example, enterprises used to have a traditional pyramid organizational structure. When they grow up, they suddenly find that the pyramid-like organizational structure is not suitable. Many enterprises have begun to try the organizational model of the business department and manage it through decentralization.
However, after the organizational model of the division grows, it is more difficult for enterprises to find such cooperation between departments and divisions. So many enterprises try multidimensional matrix management mode. However, this model has also been greatly challenged in recent years, especially in the rapidly changing external market environment, which requires rapid and timely adjustment, which puts higher demands on enterprises.
Many domestic enterprises are exploring this aspect, such as Haier's early self-management model, Huawei's team management model, and the Amoeba partner system promoted by many industries. In fact, these attempts of enterprises are to some extent hoping to reshape the original rigid organizational model. Everyone is talking about boundaryless organization now. This organizational structure is more challenging for financial personnel, that is to say, the management granularity within the enterprise is more refined.
First of all, as a financial officer, the most basic job is to settle accounts. Secondly, financial personnel need to cope with frequent changes in the organization. For example, a department may be split into several departments today, and several departments need to be merged tomorrow. If we follow the traditional financial standards step by step, it will become more and more difficult to adapt to business needs. Based on the above background, financial sharing has four important development trends in recent years.
4. What are the new developments in financial sharing?
The function of financial shared service center extends from the traditional "accounting factory" to "data center" and "supervision center". There are problems in the traditional information provision model based on accounting assumptions, which can not provide real-time and dynamic business information needs of modern enterprises based on organizations and business activities. In the past, the information disclosure of the financial department was based on months, and the accounting period was months.
But for internal management, operators want to see weekly, daily or even real-time financial data. In 1970s, the traditional accounting based on double entry bookkeeping was actually challenged. In fact, at that time, many enterprises had begun to discuss and think about the financial sharing center, but they just stayed in the ivory tower, which did not have a great impact on the practical field, because the information technology at that time could not support the granularity expected by accounting.
In recent years, with the development of information technology, we can now see that many memory-based calculations are tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of times that of traditional calculation methods. This was impossible in the past, but now it is possible. Enterprises have now put forward the mode of "homologous separation of business accounts", that is to say, the information existing in accounting is no longer the account organization on the voucher, but covers all the basic business information, which can meet both financial and business needs.
In the process of its implementation, the enterprise uses several core technologies: in-memory multidimensional database. Relying on this technology, a multi-dimensional financial model is constructed, and accounting, management and operation analysis reports are issued in real time. Decouple rules and processes to form a unified intelligent rule engine library. Whether it is budget, cost, capital or tax, the rules are uniformly designed.
For example, in the contract system and expense reimbursement system, enterprises only need to provide a standard interface and connect with the rule engine to realize a complete control chain. On the one hand, it expands the analytical ability of traditional financial control through the latest multidimensional analysis library, on the other hand, it strengthens the financial monitoring ability with the help of rule engine.
A new generation of artificial intelligence technology is widely used in financial shared service centers, which has become the main driving force of the new round of financial management reform. Thankfully, in the first year, we had close cooperation with Iflytek, and Iflytek did very well in speech technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning. With the help of Iflytek technology, machines can perform some actions instead of human eyes, mouth and ears, and even think instead of human brain.
There are many application scenarios here, such as intelligent form filling, intelligent audit, intelligent association, intelligent report and so on. In the past, enterprises filled in documents manually. Now enterprises can directly extract the required information through OCR scanning technology and automatically fill in the documents. In the past, the audit link was very tiring. Now, through intelligent audit, you can intelligently choose some conventional audit rules.
Intelligent association is to establish this connection between information and information through the underlying knowledge map. For example, financial personnel only need to fill in business items when filling out forms, and the background realizes the docking and conversion between business language and financial language through intelligent technology. At present, enterprises are still dragging their feet to read reports, but the latest technology can call data through language.
The enterprise shared service center has developed from single function to multi-function, and the cross-regional and cross-functional shared operation mode has been favored by more and more leading enterprises. Relevant reports show that 86% of research enterprises are developing shared service mode or business process outsourcing mode, and 54% of research enterprises are establishing multi-functional shared service centers. We can see that there are many areas of sharing, accounting is the core function, and then IT extends to IT, human procurement and other functions.
Domestic enterprises that established financial sharing centers in the early days, such as Vanke and Haier, have actually entered the multi-sharing center model. Haier's sharing center includes not only financial sharing, but also business procurement sharing.
Sharing will be everywhere in the future. For example, as an audit company, audit can be made into a sharing center. For IT service companies, enterprises can uniformly extract some public parts such as front-end implementers and technicians to establish a sharing center.
The sharing platform provided in the first year is no longer a single financial sharing platform, covering funds, procurement, taxation and so on. This is a fully functional sharing platform.
Based on the "business travel sharing+purchasing sharing+financial sharing+tax sharing", the intelligent sharing platform of production, finance and tax integration extends from back-end finance to front-end business, opening up the business flow and capital flow of enterprises, covering the whole process of all employees internally, covering the whole value chain externally and connecting suppliers, business travel and customers. , as well as external systems such as banks and taxation, realize the organic integration of business processes, accounting processes and management processes, and realize the transparency and automation of transactions.
In China, this aspect is still in its infancy and development stage, and most of them have single functions. Only the shared service center of individual enterprises covers finance, taxation and legal affairs. This is a process of continuous development.
A new generation of shared service platform characterized by internet, mobility and intelligence has become a bridge to promote the upgrading of traditional ERP and realize the integration of industry and finance. With the development of technology, traditional ERP vendors, such as SAP, UFIDA, Kingdee and Inspur, are also upgrading their information systems. Because the traditional technical architecture is basically 10 years ago, these enterprises cannot absorb artificial intelligence technology well. In order to connect with the external Internet world, the technical architecture of traditional enterprises has been greatly challenged.
Traditional ERP vendors are also upgrading their new generation products. However, for most enterprises, it is costly and risky to overthrow the system established in the past 10 or even longer. Therefore, many enterprises have adopted a compromise approach, and the shared platform only solves some of their existing problems.
Sharing platforms are basically launched in recent years, and the latest and most advanced technologies are applied. So enterprises now put many of its functions on a shared platform. Traditional ERP only keeps the most basic part. For example, enterprises may keep the management function of financial general ledger, while the front-end financial related functions are put on the shared platform, which is also a route for many domestic enterprises to conceive the shared service center at present.