Happy Holidays to the Heroes of the Spreadsheet!

Happy Holidays to the Heroes of the Spreadsheet!

As a veteran of the accounting trenches—having navigated everything from pharma distribution to regional controllership at Yahoo—I know that for those of us in Finance, the "Holiday Season" often sounds a lot like "Year-End Prep Season". While the rest of the world is debating eggnog recipes, we are usually debating the accuracy of accruals and the alignment of intercompany plug accounts.

But this year, there is a special kind of magic in the air. The landscape of our work is changing for the better. As we pause to celebrate with our families, let’s take a moment to appreciate the progress we’ve made in leaving "Excel-hell" behind.

My Festive Wishes for the Finance Family:

• For our new NetSuite Friends: May your first holiday season with access to automated Account Reconciliations (ARCS) be truly merry. May it bring you the gift of time—hours you used to spend on manual VLOOKUPs now spent by the fireplace.
• To the SAP Power Users: May your data integrations be seamless and your consolidation hearts remain firmly anchored in Oracle EPM. We know the secret: your ERP is German, but your best-of-breed consolidation needs are pure Oracle.
• To the Tax Teams: May you never again be treated like the person invited to the Christmas party ten minutes before it ends. May your TRCS provisioning be as strategic and integrated as the rest of the corporate close.
• To the Consolidation Experts: May your Minority Interest (NCI) calculations and Intercompany eliminations be nothing more than a satisfying "OK" system status on your dashboard.
• For the HFM Veterans: May this be the year you trade your "hosted on-prem" patches for the true innovation of a native Cloud EPM platform. Updating an old version and calling it "cloud" is like putting a bow on a 30-year-old engine—it's still a 30-year-old engine.
• For the OneStream Crowd: I wish you the clarity to realize that "modernized on-prem" in an AWS or Azure garage is a long way from the freedom of true SaaS.

The Ultimate Gift: A "Stress-Free Close"

My biggest wish for all of you is that you get to enjoy the full Redwood Experience—an intuitive, efficient workflow that lets you focus on telling the story behind the numbers rather than just processing them. You deserve a finance cockpit that is as modern and sophisticated as the businesses you help lead.

Whether you are reconciling, reporting, or forecasting, I hope your journals are balanced, your master data is a "Single Source of Truth," and your automated tasks run flawlessly while you enjoy a well-deserved break.

From my home office at www.lodroman.com to yours, have a wonderful, automated, and truly happy holiday season!

Let’s make the coming year the one where we finally stop surviving the close and start leading it.

Warm regards,

Nadia Lodroman Oracle EPM Consultant & Finance Veteran