Effective collaboration between stakeholders is a major challenge in large organizations
SUMMARY
This article explains the importance of collaboration in operating financial processes for mid-sized companies.
We explore three main challenges that impact corporate finance teams.
Reading time: 2 minutes 04 seconds
Collaboration challenges in financial processes: a strategic issue for mid-sized businesses
In companies with 100 to 2000 employees—where departments are numerous and financial processes become complex—effective cross-team collaboration is often a major challenge. Whether it’s for monthly reporting, month-end close, or budget planning, miscommunication, delays, and silos hinder overall financial performance. As a company grows, its processes become less centralized. Without the right tools and clear governance, collaboration quickly devolves into a scramble of Excel files, conflicting versions, and endless email follow-ups. Solving these problems isn’t just about saving time — it’s about improving decision quality, transparency, and compliance.
Challenge 1: The chaos of shared Excel files
LThe main obstacle to collaboration stems from the widespread use of Excel files to manage critical processes. Each department maintains its own version of a budget or report, leading to inconsistencies, formula errors, and duplicates. This persists because Microsoft Excel is flexible, familiar, and quick to deploy.
But Excel isn’t designed for multi-user environments where governance, traceability, and automation are essential. This model quickly becomes unmanageable when dozens of people need to contribute to the same process.
Challenge 2: Dependency on key individuals
In many organizations, knowledge of financial processes is concentrated in the minds of a few people: the senior analyst who knows how to reconcile everything, the controller managing the budget model, or the admin who understands the tracking sheets. This makes the organization vulnerable in case of absence, turnover, or overload.
This dependency naturally arises when processes are complex, undocumented, lack clear procedures, and when know-how isn’t informally transferred over time.
Challenge 3: Lack of real-time visibility
Decision-makers often have a partial, fragmented, or delayed view of financial indicators. Data consolidation takes time, and adjustments are made at the last minute, which slows down decision-making.
This issue stems from fragmented technical architecture (ERP, HR, sales, projects…) and the absence of a central platform where data can automatically converge to produce reliable reports.
Conclusion
To mitigate these challenges, several options exist: adopting a specialized solution like the FP&A platform SwiftFinance, which centralizes data, enables real-time collaborative work, and replaces ungoverned Excel files; establishing clear governance for financial processes with roles, steps, and deadlines; and automating repetitive tasks such as data imports, consolidations, or notifications.
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Three collaboration challenges in Finance