720668Cloud CFOClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UKFinancial staff within multi-company groups spend excess time and effort consolidating accounts data, drawn from disparate accounts packages and trial balances, and use their own bespoke spreadsheets to manipulate and analyse the data with few/no audit checks. Quality control relies on the individual. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions are available (Oracle/SAP) but are unwieldy and impose outside process resulting in user rejection. Spreadsheet solutions abound across all sizes of company. Further, financial staff are unable to acquire an externalised view of how their own organisation compares to the competition. Tax authorities are unable to interrogate the account sets they hold in an economic manner. Building on their previous SMART Development of Prototype (DoP) project which delivered a cloud based relational database connecting multiple user spreadsheets to create a single data set, Synapse will develop Cloud CFO to address the above two problems in the accounting world. UK/US tax authorities insist accounts are submitted in XBRL format – a Rosetta stone that can link accounts data to a common taxonomy. Acknowledging Innovate UK guidelines Cloud CFO has technical development leading to a significant step change in how computers are used, reducing inefficient, costly and inaccurate manual intervention. A challenging and innovative project having the capability of changing how group companies compile and consolidate accounts for internal and external reporting, saving many 100’s of hours of expensive accountant’s time. The introduction of Semantic query allows CFOs to benchmark company performance against the competition, identify likely candidates for acquisition and enable tax authorities to interrogate and analyse data.