Record to Report by Redwood: Complete Review

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Updated January 11, 2025
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Read this comprehensive review of the finance automation solution called Record to Report Automation by Redwood to understand how does it work, its key features, and pricing:

If you are a part of any finance team, you know that year-round there is a heavy amount of repetitive, manual tasks across all areas of finance. And that’s not even including the overwhelming war-room situation during the closing period!

These tasks are generally so tremendous, error-prone, and time-consuming that it does not leave you any scope to focus on other high-value work for your department.

So, what if you could automate these repetitive, mundane tasks to remove latency from financial processes, ensure error-free records, and free the staff to focus on more value-generating tasks? Sound too good to be true?

It is possible. However, choosing a capable automation solution and driving the automation project efficiently is challenging and needs a lot of care & attention. Otherwise, you may end up coming back to your initial pain points and the investment in automation goes in vain.

We are here to ease the pain.

Redwood Finance Automation

Record to Report Automation by Redwood

In this article, we are going to talk about a comprehensive finance automation solution called Record to Report Automation by Redwood, which has the capability of easily transforming and automating the end-to-end processes across your finance & accounting department, while increasing efficiency, speed, and quality.

Let’s get started and review Record to Report Automation by Redwood!

Company Overview

Company: Redwood

Redwood Logo

Website: Redwood

Company Mission: “To orchestrate IT, finance, and business workflows end-to-end with automation that’s easy to connect, build, and run.”

Headquarter: Frisco, TX

Founded: 1993

Industry: Computer Hardware & software

Customers: RBS, HP, Mercedes-Benz, UBS, gsk, Daikin, and many more big clients worldwide.

About Product

Record to Report Automation by Redwood is either an on-premises or cloud-based software (SaaS) that manages your end-to-end finance and accounting processes while eradicating huge manual efforts. It supports the four pillars of finance processes: Record to Report (R2R), Order to Cash (O2C), Procures to Pay (P2P), and asset accounting.

Be it maintaining records, financial reporting, working capital management, cash collection, invoicing, payments, or asset accounting – Redwood takes care of it all by automating all processes across finance and thus saving the time spent on massive, repetitive manual tasks.

The time saved in manual production lets your team focus more on analysis and have more control of your finance operations.

Redwood Finance automation

Redwood not only automates the financial processes but also provides useful insights to the finance team that helps in decision making and knowing how the business is doing.

Deployment Types: On-premises, SAAS

Languages Supported: English

Free Trial: No

Mobile Application: No

Website: finance-automation

Product Highlights

  • End-to-End automation and management of complex finance processes.
  • Compatible with your existing legacy and cloud applications. No add-ons are needed.
  • Automates & manages Record to Report (R2R), Procure to Pay (P2P), Intercompany accounting, Balance sheet reconciliation, Order to Cash(O2C), Journal Entry, Close checklist, and a lot more.
  • Intelligent process mapping.
  • Variety of pre-automated, ready-to-use tasks for process development.
  • Overall, cuts down 80-90% of manual efforts across finance.
  • Easy and rapid scaling for automated processes across the office of CFO, as per need.
  • Compatible with ERP systems as well as other business applications.
  • Built-in BPM along with insightful dashboards.
  • Built-in auditing. Logs are generated for all steps within the processes.
  • Security-first, single-tenant design along with full encryption.
  • Single SAAS instance.
  • Experts advise on best practices to assist your automation better.
  • 24*7 in-house support.

Key Features

The key features include the following:

  • Single SAAS instance: Reduce server and virtual machine infrastructure and maintenance, as the entire end-to-end finance solution is fully supported and maintained in a unified SAAS instance.
  • Built-in processes and standard connectors: Build your processes with ready-to-use components with almost no coding required.
  • Self-Healing: Your processes stay resistant through smart conditional logic that avoids errors and can fix issues automatically on its own.
  • Automated Lifecycle Management: Unified source control, rollback, and audit logs, empower end-to-end lifecycle management of your finance processes.
  • Security, Governance, and compliance: Extensive secure, and compliant solution inclusive of TLS 1.2+ encryption, ISO 27001 certification, SSO/SAML authentication, granular access control. Audit logging for all automation and user activities.
  • Event-Driven Triggers: For time-critical workflows, we can set processes to execute when a specific event(s) occurs. It could be certain transactions, data transfers, or messages.
  • Predictive SLA monitoring: Pre-configured predictive SLA monitoring helps to ensure the performance of crucial processes.
  • Monitoring and Reporting: Status updates, dashboards, and visual progress charts of end-to-end processes at a single place. Also offers an integrated report builder.
  • Enterprise Scalability: Automate processes from start to finish, rather than handling individual steps. Execute processes simultaneously to fulfill crucial deadlines.

Use Cases

  • Cloud-based Record to Report (R2R) automation.
    • End close checklist: Put together a number of interrelated close tasks like reconciliations, journals, and intercompany at a unified, automated cloud center.
    • Balance sheet reconciliation: Speeds up the reconciliation process by eliminating manual work and enabling the auto-certify options for up to 80% of accounts.
    • General Ledger: Mitigates the risk of errors and fraud through automated journal entries comprising provisions, accruals, reserves, and beyond.
    • Intercompany accounting: Automated workflows to figure out and resolve intercompany differences sooner in the close cycle.
  • Faster & Better cash management through automated Order to Cash (O2C).
    • Billing: Automated billing processes including emails, web, phone, fax to eliminate billing errors and save manual efforts.
    • Cash Allocation: Automated allocation processes to attain precise DSOs, allocate cash accordingly, and compute potential debt provisions.
    • Cash Collection: Automatically prepares data for collection, settling bank accounts, and generates receivable reporting.
  • Consolidated, SAAS-based Procure to Pay (P2P) Software Solution.
    • Includes automated management of invoicing, purchase orders, purchase requests, cost management, and a lot more.
    • Joined-up: Can connect virtually to any endpoint and collect data from distinct systems or applications to handle payments better and accurately.
    • Frictionless Payments: Improved and faster payment process. Reduces the complexity involved in processing payments through various departments and teams across the organization.
    • Automates manual tasks in the purchasing process: Smartly handle incoming invoices, make payment proposals, compute required accruals and postings, reconcile supplier and bank positions, and generate payable reports.
    • Orchestrate across silos: Redwood gives you an integrated solution by automating existing end-to-end processes. You don’t need to get any add ons. Be it ERP systems or data warehouses, Redwood is compatible with your existing systems, regardless of technology and service providers. It works well with existing applications like OCR & invoice processing, supplier portals, procurement software, report management apps, reconciliation, and way more.
  • Automated Asset Management
    • Plan acquisitions: Ready to use acquisition tasks inside applications and incorporated workflow for approvals.
    • Follows standards and best practices: Proper procurement processes are followed.
    • Asset Tracking: Redwood creates all required master data and enters records in the ERP system or asset management system. You can simply track and finance projects while assuring timelines and metrics are met.
    • Plan for the future: Automatically execute reconciliation and depreciation to indicate the current value of your assets.
  • Hybrid Cloud Automation
    • Flawlessly automate and arrange on-site and cloud ERP instances and processes through business logic that connects crucial ERP transactions and confirms data integrity.

How does Record to Report Automation by Redwood Works

With Redwood, there are basically three major steps that need to be followed to automate your finance processes:

  • Define in Process Editor: With the help of a lot of built-in, ready-to-use tasks, your finance team can design the automation of finance processes, with no specific IT training required. By looking at your data, metadata, and tables in ERP, Redwood is intelligent enough to understand and mimic your finance system.
processor editor
  • Process Orchestration: With the help of an orchestration engine, multiple processes can be connected with each other and quickly compiled. The process steps can be effortlessly linked with human approvals and review cycles wherever needed. It automatically records output back and forth between your financial systems and easily replicates & alters your entire process.
porocess orchestration

Below is a sample view of process orchestration:

sample view of process orchestration
  • Execute in Workbench: Your processes can be launched automatically with no manual effort needed. It still gives you full control and authority to intervene if needed. Through dashboards, you can monitor the progress of the processes running, and can easily detect any blockages or process improvements.
workbench

Customer Success Stories

#1) Allianz

Allianz

Headquartered in Munich, Germany, Allianz SE is one of the world’s largest finance services MNC, with insurance and asset management as its core business.

With thousands of employees worldwide, Allianz wanted to find a solution that could cut down its repetitive, manual tasks so that the FTEs can focus on more value-generating tasks. They also wanted a solution that could eliminate existing delays in trade processing, which was leading to latency and backlog.

Allianz employed Redwood Finance automation and, as a result, they got 30 key accounting & R2R financial processes automated, live, and functioning effectively. Now, there is error-free, faster processing of records without any manual involvement. Overall, it led to an 80% cut in manual efforts across all financial processes.

#2) Genentech

Genentech

Genentech is a biotechnology corporation in San Francisco, California, USA. With greater than $15 billion in annual revenue and 16,000 employees, Genentech has a strong culture of continuous improvement.

In an effort to remove latency from their existing processes and reduce employees’ stress, Genpact started automating its finance and accounting processes using the SAP Financial Closing Cockpit pilot.

When they were in the middle of implementation, it was realized that the level of automation was far lower than expected, there was still a lot of latency in the close process and thus the stress level of the staff was still high at the month-end.

So, Genentech decided to run a pilot project with Redwood Automation Finance. And they quickly started receiving benefits beyond expectations, within three weeks.

The effort continued for the next three months, and Genentech achieved 88% automation of their processes. End-to-end close times were reduced by 50%, there was no latency in close processes, and no more war-rooms at month-end.

Automated workflows eradicated the practice of sending ad hoc email notifications, and there were noticeable compliance improvements. Work in progress balance progressing dropped down from eight hours to just a few minutes. Now the financial analysts focus on higher valued tasks, leading to more ROI and cost savings.

Finally, with the help of Redwood Finance Automation, Genentech automated all financial close, manufacturing close, product costing, and reporting methods in manufacturing plants.

Pricing

They offer customized, ‘pay-for-what-you-use’ pricing plans. Contact the Redwood team for pricing.

Customer Support

  • 24*5 support by in-house automation experts for all issues and 24*7 support for sev-1 issues.
  • Smooth migration and onboarding. Redwood ensures fast transition.
  • Consulting services to help your business do better.
  • Scale on demand.
  • Online training by Redwood University.

Pros And Cons

Pros include:

  • Utility-based pricing: You will be charged on the number of processes you run.
  • Application-based automation: It offers control and maintainability to your core financial systems and processes.
  • No additional IT training is required to use the product.
  • Improved visibility for stakeholders.
  • Outstanding out-of-the-box features aids in speeding up the processes and eliminating human errors.
  • Three-tier environment – smoothly push processes between development, test, and prod.
  • Streamlined and optimized R2R processes.
  • Reduced cycle times and Days Sales Outstanding (DSOs).
  • Faster cash collection and smoother order to cash cycle.
  • Ensures compliance and security – enforces SSO/SAML 2.0+, built-in audits, TLS 1.2+ encryption, ISO 27001 certified.
  • Huge cost-saving and increased productivity across P2P processes.
  • Eliminates up to 90% of the manual effort included in asset management.
  • Up to 95% automation of intercompany processes.
  • Overall, an 80-90% reduction in manual efforts frees your finance staff to focus on other value-added work.
  • Gives you the flexibility to design custom automated processes as per your business requirements.

Cons include:

No major cons as such. However, there are a few areas where Redwood can further improve.

  • Currently, it supports only the English language. They may expand and make this product available in a few more languages for its wider adoption.
  • Could add more features in the data transformer.
  • Could have a free trial to run POCs.
  • Business users may not understand some errors without IT knowledge.

Conclusion

Redwood Finance Automation lets you plug the automation gap and cut manual efforts throughout finance and accounting processes. It eliminates inefficiencies across accruals, provisions, reclassifications, intercompany, reconciliations, ERP close tasks, and much more.

It provides you with insights to boost business and gives the finance staff more time to do analysis. Overall, it helps you to improve accuracy and meet timelines.

This product is a right fit for large enterprises, which are looking for cutting down manual efforts by automating and standardizing financial processes.

We will highly recommend going with this tool to automate your regular finance, accounting, and controlling activities across the office of the CFO.

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