Why Customers Choose Workiva and the Cloud: Scalability

Finance, accounting, risk and compliance professionals have given us many reasons for choosing Wdesk. In this blog series, we are exploring each of the top 10 reasons organisations move their reporting and compliance to the cloud.

Successful companies and organisations need cost-efficient accounting, finance, risk and compliance technologies that move as fast as they do.

As organisations look to the cloud to modernise business processes, more than 3,000 have turned to Workiva. We help teams eliminate manual tasks with a streamlined workflow, so they can focus on the quality of their final reports. One of the main reasons teams trust Workiva is for scalable solutions that grow with their needs.

Reason Number 4: Scalability

Exponential growth can mean days of extra work for teams tasked with managing its side effects, whether it is revenue, head count, risks or even regulations and reporting requirements.

For example, after the financial crisis of 2008, Congress enacted Dodd-Frank Act Stress Testing, or DFAST, to show how well financial institutions could absorb losses and maintain key operations. Wintrust Financial Corp. initially used traditional, PC-based word processing and spreadsheets for its stress test reporting—which included many different manual processes to collect the 150 documents that fed into Wintrust's 250-page DFAST submission to regulators.

Desktop-based software and manual processes may be fine for smaller operations, but in the case of growing enterprises and sizeable operations like Wintrust, reporting processes must be able to keep up with regulatory requirements and increasing documentation.

Internal expectations are changing, too. For finance teams, the ability to turn around ad hoc requests can mean the difference between giving board members an answer today or missing the window where you can act on a competitive advantage.

In the case of both external and internal demands, budgets still limit how quickly you can add staff.

Cloud solutions help teams tackle the variables of rapid change, including:

• Fluctuating number of internal and external users
• Frequency of reporting and analysis
• Increasing volume of data

Say you need to add licences or equipment to accommodate growth in one of those three areas. Traditionally, you might have to wait for your procurement department to approve a purchase. Then, your IT team needs time to instal new software or hardware. Cloud providers typically allow you to pay for what you use, which means you can easily shrink or expand, depending on your need.

How Wdata and Wdesk support high-performance analysis

For many banks, including Wintrust, taking on Dodd-Frank stress test reporting added hours of work. Rather than rely on unsustainable manual processes, Wintrust moved its DFAST process to Wdesk. Other companies have chosen Wdesk to automate certain processes in their growing audit, accounting, finance, risk and compliance functions.

While most cloud solutions can tout some level of scalability, Wdesk also automates manual tasks, allows multiple users to collaborate, links shared data and provides a full audit trail of changes. Using Wdata to bring structured and unstructured data into Wdesk streamlines the process even further. Prep, our solution for data preparation, empowers finance teams to generate enriched, customised datasets for analysis from billions of records in seconds.

In short, Wdesk and Wdata enable teams to manage large volumes of work more efficiently while creating clean final reports and presentations for regulators and key stakeholders. Best of all, the results can be seen throughout the organisation—including the boardroom.

Anita Chakravarthy of the Wintrust corporate finance team said Wdesk gave her team more time to respond to board requests. Before Wdesk, it would take about a day and a half to run a different iteration of DFAST and another day and a half to compile the results into a presentation. That process changed dramatically with Wdesk.

"We were able to take that day and a half of compiling the results and making a presentation out of it into two hours," said Anita.

Learn more

Watch this blog as we continue to explore the top 10 reasons organisations choose Workiva and the cloud.

If you are ready to see more right away, you can request a demo to see Wdesk and Wdata up close.