3 minute with Adam Rakich, Northexis

In this edition of 3 Minutes with, Adam Rakich of Northexis, author of The Business User’s Guide to Data Integration, explains why finance teams skip the servicing until something breaks, and the one small monthly job any team can start with. 

You’ve spent 14+ years at Adaptive Insights, Workday and OneStream. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in how finance and accounting teams approach planning, reporting and consolidation?

Less than you’d think!

The tools have come a long way, of course. Especially AI-wise.

The problems, though, are basically the same. People still turn up to meetings with two different numbers for the same thing. Budgetholders still dread the process. Reports still get added and never, ever removed.

So the technology has moved an enormous distance, but all the agreeing and chasing and explaining around it hasn’t moved at all.

Your book ‘The Business User’s Guide to Data Integration’ is written for non-technical people. Why do accountants struggle with data integration, and what’s the first step towards automating their data flows?

I’d say it’s partly that nobody tells them they’re already doing it.

If someone opens two systems, copies from one, reformats it and pastes it into the other – that’s a data integration. Just an unreliable one with a salary.

The rest is that nobody ever taught them. You can qualify, and spend years in finance, without anyone once showing you how data gets from one system to another. And then it quietly becomes a big part of the job.

First step: pick one flow and write down what it actually is. Where the data starts, who touches it, what they change on the way. Most people can’t do that for their own month-end – and you can’t automate something you can’t describe.

In your upcoming FD Show Virtual Summit webinar, ‘Your FP&A MOT (and the service schedule you didn’t know you needed)’, you’re comparing FP&A to a car. Why do finance teams so often skip the MOT and the servicing until something breaks?

Because nothing ever breaks badly enough to make you. You just…keep struggling.

Your car gets you a letter from the DVLA. Nobody sends you a letter about your budget process. And the budget always gets done in the end – it just costs a bit more every year, is maybe a little bit worse. And everyone quietly adjusts to that.

There’s never a good moment, either. When it’s running you’re far too busy to fix it, and the moment it’s over you never want to see it again.

So you have to make the moment yourself. Nothing else is going to.

You’ll be covering what to “service” monthly, quarterly and annually. If a team can only start with one small monthly service, what should it be?

Tell the business something. Anything!

What’s coming, what changed, what you’re working on and why. Two lines in whatever channel people actually read.

It sounds too soft to be a “service”, I know. But communication is the biggest lever there is, it’s completely free, and finance teams do far less of it than they think they do.

And it costs you nothing but two minutes.

What do you want webinar attendees to take away from your session?

That the process is theirs.

I meet a lot of finance teams who talk about budgeting and reporting as weather – something that arrives every year and has to be endured. It isn’t. You own it, you can change it, and most of what’s wrong with it is free to fix. Free doesn’t mean easy, but you can do it.

Beyond that, just that there’s an order to it. Do the MOT critical things first. There’s no point building a rolling forecast on top of numbers two people in the room don’t agree on.

And take the schedule away with you. Fill it in, then fill it in again in three months, and watch the line move.

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