KNIME for Finance: It's time for finance automation

Finance departments are at the heart of each company. Finance activities include planning, forecasting, budgeting, and analysis to support major business decisions and analyze the overall financial health of the company, as well as accounting and treasury tasks.

All those activities require precision, correctness, repeatability, and speed. In order to obtain repeatable, reliable, correct, and fast procedures, many companies have already started digital transformation projects for all finance processes.

Now it's time for finance automation!

You don't need a full lab of software developers to implement the automated procedures that a finance department needs. Low code tools, like KNIME Analytics Platform, provide the same level of reliability as programming languages but can be adopted also by non-programmers. 

Next to being an AI enabling and data science tool, KNIME Analytics Platform is often used to automate processes and analysis. KNIME Analytics Platform is a low code / no code tool, therefore suitable for employees who are not programmers but have a business background. KNIME Analytics Platform is also free to download and use. 

KNIME Analytics Platform offers a large variety of connectors, all standardized, all presenting the same UI, making it very easy to connect to all types of data sources: databases, ERP systems, CRM software, web resources, files, cloud repositories, and more. 

KNIME Business Hub, the commercial counterpart of KNIME Analytics Platform, allows for collaboration, productionization, and scheduling of all implemented operations. Which means it allows for automation. This is very practical in finance departments, as you can generate the report you need on Monday morning, regularly, using the latest data, on time, and at a low cost, without any manual work.

One last note is about governance. In finance use cases, governance is always critical. To make sure you remain within the legal boundaries, you need to know at any point which data is being used, for which task, where it is saved, and in general you need to understand what each workflow does. In KNIME Analytics Platform, due to its step-wise execution and its visual interface, you can always inspect the results of each step individually. In this way all data produced by an application can be traced back to its original data, understood, and modified if needed. 

All of that makes KNIME software suitable for the automation of finance operations.

The core of finance operations includes all FP&A processes, like budgeting, monitoring revenues and costs, and measuring returns of investments, plus accounting (e.g. payment slips, overview over all bank accounts etc.) and tax calculation and payment. 

A whole set of operations for finance departments includes the calculation, visualization, and communications of pre-defined KPI measures (Key Performance Indicators). There are tons of KPI that could be used to monitor the state of the company: for revenue growth, employee turnover, SaaS usage, market share, and recently also for CO2 production, gender imbalance, and so on. Usually just a handful is adopted to monitor the business state at any point in time.

Often in small companies, finance departments might also cover Audit & Compliance, while in bigger companies those activities belong to dedicated departments.

KNIME Analytics Platform can automate the operations of all such sectors. With the drag&drop of nodes, you can build the pipeline of basic tasks that implements a given operation. As much as KNIME Analytics Platform is easy to use, it is even easier to start from a pre-packaged example and customize it to your own data and business. 

We have created a set of jump-start workflows for common operations in finance. All those blueprint workflows have been stored in a dedicated repository on the KNIME Community Hub, named KNIME for Finance, and are available for free download and usage. This is a live repository, being continuously updated, with new example workflows being added as we speak.

So far, the KNIME for Finance space includes six folders, mirroring the topics covered in a generic finance department: Accounting, Audit & Compliance, FP&A, Financial services, KPI, and Tax.  (Note that the additional folder “Archived (KNIME AP 4.X)”. This folder is contains older applications, still running on KNIME Analytics Platform 4.7 and not yet transitioned to KNIME Analytics Platform 5.2.)

Explore the KNIME for Finance space for automation inspiration!