You don’t have to be the head honcho of a global tech giant to gaze into the future and offer insightful predictions on what’ll shape our technological future, but it sure doesn’t hurt when it comes to expanding that narrative’s outreach.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, speaking at the Forbes CIO Summit last month, said the big picture future-scoping business trend would be smarter and more predictive software.
Dispensing his thoughts on the future of enterprise software, which was reported by Business Insider and others, Benioff made a point of touting systems that are capable of data input, analysis and directive recommendations, based on that analysis, as most likely to be riding high on the next wave of opportunity.
“This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter, everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what’s the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient,” Benioff said.
Of course, Benioff isn’t alone in this thinking – he just happens to hold a pretty bombastic bullhorn when he speaks. A recent Gartner report on the top strategic predictions for 2016 and into our digital future included the estimate that by 2018, 20 percent of business content would be authored by machines. As the report notes, “Technologies with the ability to proactively assemble and deliver information through automated composition engines are fostering a movement from human- to machine-generated business content.”
We couldn’t agree more. In fact, we’re already in that automated future, doing this for your company’s revenue accounting team. Or, we could be.
RevPro, the world’s leading revenue recognition and forecasting solution, offers a rules-based engine robust enough to automate even the most complex revenue processes and produce accurate and consistent revenue outputs with speed and ease.
Take the case of one cutting-edge corporation smack dab in the midst of the technology and entertainment sectors, for which RevPro not only brought their revenue processing out of the dark ages of manual spreadsheet reliance, but helped overcome significant roadblocks in the form of complex allocations and other calculations, such as implied post-contract customer support (PCS). The company’s month-long close was slashed by more than a third, through much less human-generated data, and their audit preparedness today is through the roof, thanks to eliminated material weaknesses, standardized testing requirements and a new reliance on more objective revenue processes and systems.
Jagan Reddy, Leeyo Founder & CEO, said maximizing automation in revenue recognition has been a key company focus from the beginning, but now more so than ever with ASC 606, “Revenue from Contracts with Customers,” the newly converged revenue guidance from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).
“The principle-based nature of this new guidance makes for a much more significant requirement from an automation software standpoint to help support judgments made by a company’s business and revenue teams,” said Reddy. “We know from experience every company has somewhat different requirements and interpretations for compliance with the new standard, and have built a product flexible enough to address every scenario.”
The company highlighted earlier was – and still is – unclear on the total eventual impact of ASC 606 at the time of a RevPro implementation, which included a thorough ‘scrubbing’ of millions of lines of data. However, the firm was already factoring revenue convergence into how transactions, internal processes and systems will be impacted to be prepared well in advance. We hope this isn’t a unique situation, but fear it may be.
“Leading up to the new standard, we expect everyone to spend this intervening time testing new scenarios in comparison to their compliance with current accounting standards,” said Reddy. “RevPro was created out of the nascent need for a more predictive revenue recognition application, and the current upheaval is the clearest signal yet the shift to smarter software in revenue isn’t the future, but the present.”