From Digital to Intelligent: Transforming the Financial Close with KPMG
KPMG’s Intelligent Close™ helps finance organizations move from manual, time-consuming close cycles to a streamlined, AI-enabled model. By embedding automation, real-time analytics, and autonomous AI agents across accounting and reporting, the solution improves accuracy, speeds up the close, and elevates finance into a true strategic partner. Delivered through Finance as a Service, it provides the technology, talent, and operating model to modernize finance at scale.
From digital to intelligent close
Picture this – It’s the 11th hour of your financial close (again)—and the pressure is on. A single adjustment at the end of the quarter can trigger over 100 changes, resulting in late nights, manual errors, and stress over what might have been missed.
Generative AI (GenAI) is often exalted as the answer to these problems and so many other challenges, but for finance and accounting, it’s important to remember the foundational processes and technologies required to make your life manageable.
By applying emerging technology, traditional accounting activities can evolve to what we at KPMG call the “Intelligent Close.” KPMG LLP’s Intelligent CloseTM goes one step further to embed digital, analytical, and artificial intelligence capabilities from the creation of a transaction through to accounting and reporting—improving the spend and quality of the close. This includes AI agents that can perform tasks autonomously under strict governance and controls.
Firms can revolutionize their finance organization from being the accountant to a value creator with the four components of an Intelligent Close.
- Trusted transactions: Ensuring transactional data is accurate and secure, leading to strategic insights that can be delivered to key stakeholders and drive business strategies, enable continued business growth, and reduce risk.
- Autonomous accounting: Leveraging enabling technologies, exception-based methodologies, autonomous AI agents, and integrated end-to-end processes to shorten close-time cycles and drive operational and financial efficiencies.
- Real-time reporting: Persona-driven and tailored analytics across the AI-enabled spectrum from intuitive dashboards and visualizations through to analytics, predictions, and recommendations.
- Modernization: Evolving traditional accounting into strategic centers of excellence with digital tools, agile methodologies, and a growth mindset, which drives organizational productivity, creativity, and efficiency.
Intelligent Close Gets Smarter as a Service
Intelligent Close is delivered through the KPMG Finance as a Service (FaaS)1 solution to help reduce costs and lay a solid foundation for scalable, efficient, and high-quality operations that are ready to adapt and grow with the changing business environment.
KPMG LLP (KPMG) takes on the burden of continually optimizing processes with industry-leading practices and innovative technologies so that teams can focus on creating value across the entire enterprise. These technologies can be existing client-owned technologies or KPMG-provided technologies implemented with an approach to achieve optimization.
Finance organizations can choose Intelligent Close as one of several à la carte FaaS solutions including upstream and transactional processes, intelligent performance, and enterprise data management; or they can implement the entire FaaS platform. Organizations can also choose between two FaaS delivery models:
Build and operate. KPMG’s skilled team, enabled by AI, can optimize your Intelligent Close and other finance processes while continuing to keep them running smoothly with the latest technology and practice updates.
Build, operate, and transfer. For companies that plan to scale up, KPMG can optimize capabilities and help operate them while simultaneously training your workforce until they have the skills and resources to operate the new, upgraded platform on their own.
Intelligent Close Delivered as a Service Provides Finance Organizations With:
- Controlled, highly automated finance technology architecture
- Single source of truth for finance data and reporting
- Fully reconciled, trusted data source for all financial reporting
- Reduced human intervention and risk of error
- Faster period-end close cycles
- Ability to rapidly respond to evolving regulatory demands to help minimize risk of penalties
- Access to improved financial reporting and value-add analysis through easy-to-use, customizable reports and dashboards
- Higher resource retention through an improved finance customer experience
- Ability to proactively respond to rapidly evolving finance capabilities and technologies.
With Intelligent Close delivered as a service, clients give KPMG their processes and we bring the technology and talent to deliver and drive value through the latest advanced finance and accounting capabilities.
We start by understanding your current technology capabilities and process gaps. We then help you prioritize where you want to go and offer strategies and plans to build a customized path forward. Finally, we work side by side with your team for as far as you want to go, from building and operating financial solutions to preparing the organization for a successful handoff.