Modernizing finance functions is becoming increasingly popular among top-performing finance offices seeking to take advantage of cloud-enabled capabilities like machine learning-based financial forecasting, automated document reviews, collaborative financial reporting, business process automation, and more.

By implementing modern finance solutions, organizations can capture a wide range of benefits. A few examples include:

• Better risk and compliance controls
• Greater forecasting speeds
• More rapid and accurate financial reporting
• Reduction or elimination of manual, time-consuming processes

While the benefits of modernizing finance may be apparent to many, the path to modernizing corporate finance is less clear. Given the complexity of financial operations, even determining where to start can be a daunting task. This blog discusses the top 3 reasons Neal Analytics recommends beginning with an evaluation of Microsoft Azure as a platform for modern finance.

1.  Microsoft is a pioneer of Modern Finance

Modernizing financial functions is not new to Microsoft. Digital transformations in finance has risen in popularity in recent years, Microsoft has been talking about it in their blog as far back as 2015. Since then, Microsoft has developed several cloud technologies and solutions designed to support the modern finance office, including their own.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

One detail that makes Microsoft stand out as a pioneer of modern finance is that they use many of the exact solutions they offer customers. Their achievements were so notable that the Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Microsoft about their accomplishments in the space.

2. Azure has modern solutions for virtually every finance function

Driving the modernization of its financial operations has allowed Microsoft to develop several modern, practical finance solutions. As a result of modernizing their large, mature CFO office, Microsoft has created an extensive list of modern finance solutions, many of which they list in detail in their Modern Finance ebook.

While the number of available solutions is far too lengthy to cover in this blog concisely, Microsoft categorizes the solutions into the following four areas:

• Financial analysis & reporting
• Strategy & forecasting
• Business process automation
• Risk & compliance

The number and variety of solutions available means that regardless of whether an organization wants to prioritize improving reporting capabilities, increasing the speed and accuracy of forecasting, automating manual business processes, or enhancing risk mitigation and compliance capabilities, Microsoft has solutions that can help.

3. Azure partners have experience bringing modern finance solutions to production

Beyond having proven solutions Microsoft uses in-house, Microsoft has partners who have experience successfully guiding organizations through finance modernization journeys and bringing multiple modern finance solutions into production. For example, Neal Analytics, a long-standing Microsoft Gold Partner, has hands-on experience implementing enterprise-level finance solutions such as advanced financial forecasting within major global organizations.

The forecasting solution enables organizations to drastically reduce time spent generating financial forecasts by leveraging machine learning, allowing a greater degree of tactical decision-making based on more frequently updated forecasts. Check out the case study to learn more.

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Neal Analytics also offers multiple other modern finance solutions not discussed in this blog. Contact us if you would like to learn more about solutions for corporate finance, including advanced financial forecasting, automated document review, or a solution for any other finance challenge you are facing.