To err, after all, is only human.

But Trintech’s Unity Suite can help businesses remove human error from the equation altogether. By automating complex reconciliation, review, and exception-resolution processes, Unity enables businesses to achieve significant gains in productivity and internal controls.

Maybe your resolution is geographic expansion. Unity is designed for global commerce. The collaborative architecture allows dispersed teams to co-create documents and oversee complex, automated workflows across regions. Unity supports multiple users working with multiple currencies in multiple languages.

Resolutions are about improving on last year’s efforts. For departments tasked with continuous improvement projects, Unity’s decision-support dashboards can help identify bottlenecks before they occur. Our reporting capabilities allow for complex forecasting, trending, and flux analysis, so your team can learn from the past, and do better in the future.

No matter what your corporate resolutions are, Trintech’s Unity Suite can help. We look forward to enabling an inspired – and inspiring – new year for each of our customers.

• “Automating reconciliation of high volume transactions typically delivers time and cost savings of 30% to 70% with an ROI of 6-9 months.”
• “Automating account reconciliation of GL control accounts typically delivers time and cost savings of 15% to 20% with an ROI of 12+ months.”

- Atos Consulting, Optimizing Your Reconciliation Process, 2011

Competitive businesses are constantly trying to improve on productivity, demanding more and more value from their employees, processes and technology. The term “business process optimization,” still a kind of insider’s phrase even a few years back, has now gone mainstream. And yet, even after realizing dramatic efficiency gains from newer, smarter systems and processes, some business owners find themselves wondering where the next big bump in productivity will come from.

To find the answer, look no further than your balance sheet.

In part due to its somewhat qualitative nature, the balance sheet certification process has managed to elude even the most savvy process optimization efforts. Viewed as a necessary evil, certification often remains a largely fly-by-night process, rife with manual tasks, checklists, and outdated technologies.

But for those who manage to tackle balance sheet certification, understand it, and employ a best practices approach to process consolidation and automation, the bottom-line benefits can be impressive. You saw the quotes at the beginning of this article. These are results that shouldn’t be ignored.

Trintech’s expertise in helping businesses automate all kinds of account reconciliation – from high-volume, transactional accounts to GL control accounts – gives our team on the ground a unique perspective here. That’s why we’ve recently released a new Best Practices Guide to Optimizing Balance Sheet Certification, including seven “golden rules” to consider when embarking upon your own account reconciliation automation project:

1. 1: Organize A Steering Committee
2. 2: Identify Process Gaps
3. 3: Optimize Before You Automate
4. 4: Take a Top-Down, Risk-Based Approach
5. 5: Follow a Structured Project Methodology
6. 6: Optimize in Phases
7. 7: Automation is Your Friend

Over 600 of the world’s leading organizations have successfully optimized their balance sheet certification process using Trintech technology. Download your best practices guide today to find out how you can, too.

>> Download the Best Practices Guide Now

Software vendors have taken notice. Recent years have seen a proliferation of data-driven software solutions, with polished pitches promising to automate everything from data capture and delivery to financial reporting and compliance (and everything in between). Even the engineering department is getting in on finance, repurposing data standardization tools like XBRL for use in specific financial processes.

But as Finance Managers window shop for process enforcement technology, many lose sight of larger finance goals, seeking a piece of software purpose-built to handle a specific process, department or geography. Software is a key enforcer of finance process … but it is rarely the answer to successful Finance Transformation. `

You’d think that, as a software vendor, we might want to keep a lid on this dirty little secret. But it’s true: focusing too heavily on the bells and whistles offered by any one technology package – without first creating a compliance strategy unique to your industry, your business, and your people – is a recipe for an under-utilized software installation. One which fails to provide the desired enterprise benefits. Software configuration options to support finance transformation run the gamut, from “pre-packaged” on the cloud, to fully-customized solutions. For most global finance organizations, the answer is somewhere in the “configurable” middle.

In the mid to late 1990’s, “vanilla” E.R.P. systems were all the rage. “Vanilla” offered the opportunity to get a system up and running quickly, replete with basic functionality to support rapid growth – at a time when insight to revenues and “flash” reports were most critical. But more advanced finance operations suffered, becoming increasingly complex as a result. Businesses rushed to install something, anything, that could be tagged with an E.R.P. moniker – only to discover when Sarbanes-Oxley arrived that, in the rush, they had sacrificed too many controls. The tools were under-utilized, resource planning efforts were abandoned, and the cost of those remediations was, for many, quite high.

Technology installed “for technology’s sake” can result in great process inefficiencies. Problems begin with a poor implementation, and are compounded by inadequate training or support. These systems are often ignored, or become redundant tools required to appease management. Highly customized technology often becomes very difficult to maintain, creating tension between IT and finance, or building a barrier to the necessary changes in process. These systems are then intertwined with a faulty workflow, complicating reporting and daily operations.

Many businesses look to the rapid and efficient adoption of sales automation as an example of how finance technology might be more easily deployed. But this model is flawed: while smaller, centralized finance operations with a single set of compliance standards might benefit from this “one size fits all” approach, it is rarely effective for most global operations.

Global finance is different from sales force automation. Finance is guided by a set of requirements – both internal and external – based upon a variety of subjective, but important, factors. The complexities of geography, your supply chain, business model, industry vertical, and competitive environment, must all be incorporated into your internal financial lifecycle for process change to deliver the requisite savings in time, money, and transparency. Choosing, for instance, which accounts to reconcile has a qualitative component, warranting consideration of flexible technology to support that choice. Not all reconciliation packages allow for innovative matching and exception management workflows, or allow the modeling of custom account templates to drive needed metrics.

At the other end of the spectrum, a fully custom-built solution is rarely the answer. Such systems are cost-prohibitive to install and maintain. But abandoning technology, to focus instead on re-engineering your financial processes in a vacuum, isn’t the answer either. This might result in short cuts. For example, a company might decide to localize close task management – unaware that technology can automate this process centrally.

Technology is a good enforcer. And when you’re trying to standardize processes across a wide spectrum of financial activities, technology can often be helpful in overcoming the inertia of years, sometimes decades, of established business practices. Technology can establish parameters around specific tasks, monitor inputs, track changes, and create searchable, auditable records for compliance purposes. Technology supporting the required process frameworks for finance operations, but still configurable enough to meet specific cultural and company practices, seems to be the most successful for global finance organizations.

When embarking on a Finance Transformation Initiative, the choice of tools should be an integral part of the process, not something done after the processes have been designed. Limiting your design options due to faulty assumptions about technological capabilities will undermine the effort. Here are a few rules of thumb:

Rule #1: Assume Everything Can Be Automated
Automation should provide the foundation for your initial discussion about process redesign. Invite as many diverse stakeholders as possible into the tent – including I.T. These stakeholders will come to the table with a wealth of experience, a plethora of “pain points” needing automation or management. As your diverse team of experts reworks your business’s finance tasks on paper, have them assume that a package exists to automate these onerous tasks (even if you’re not sure). Then seek out vendors with the flexibility to automate as much of your custom process as is plausible and cost-effective.

Rule #2: Assume A Risk-Based Perspective
When reworking your entire financial work flow, try to automate those areas which could expose the business to future risk, rather than automating based upon existing roles or perceived ease-of-use. Many technology vendors will offer a starting point for this sort of analysis, packages of pre-built templates, calculators, or consolidation and conversion technologies. Take these starting points, and tweak from there.

At the end of the day, you may not get everything you wanted. But you’ll have a more engaged and enthusiastic team of stakeholders, excited about implementing the changes coming down the road.

Rule #3: You Don’t Buy A Vendor, You Buy Their Tools … AND Their Vision
Software vendors are always attempting to stay ahead of the curve. Make sure you understand your vendor’s vision – it should map closely to your own. Choose a vendor with a similar philosophy, one who is willing to share their product roadmap, and help you imagine how your can achieve your desired business transformation together.

And financial governance is one huge problem facing many finance managers.

But in the rush to comply with what can seem like an overwhelming landscape of financial regulations, businesses can lose sight of the bigger picture. Compliance with any given regulation should arise naturally, as a side-effect of sound practices governing the Office of Finance. All too often, however, regulatory compliance becomes both the means AND the end, as organizations adapt their financial governance processes into limited feature sets offered by vendors selling compliance with a regulation or business problem of limited scope.

Prior to implementing our Unity Financial GRC Software Suite, several of our clients had been utilizing no less than five compliance packages, each one purchased in the hopes that it might be the “magic bullet”, rapidly transforming their business into a profitable (and compliant) organization. The results are usually less spectacular than advertised: manual workarounds or home-grown solutions are often required to transmit data between these multiple applications, and complicated, custom-built reports must be kludged together in order to give senior decision-makers the information they need to run the business.

By focusing on compliance alone, many software vendors make financial compliance more difficult to achieve (at best) and less likely to occur (at worst).

A more practical approach to financial governance instead streamlines the entire finance lifecycle – from data capture, to customer transaction management, to bank and general ledger reconcilitation, to exception management and resolution, on through to the financial close, financial reporting, and auditor communication. This more holistic view of the Office of Finance allows businesses to focus on developing a healthy process as a means to eventual regulatory compliance.

At this time in most finance organizations, reengineering at the process level has occurred. Even if this reengineering has not yet been fully implemented, these finance transformation projects have distilled an established set of “best practices”. The technologies to embed those best practices into daily workflow are often misaligned with the overall transformation initiatives. The result is a feudal system of warring departments, each fending for itself, hoping that a discretionary budget can help purchase a “magic bullet” to solve its compliance issues.

But the “magic bullet” just doesn’t exist – these bullets might arm one department with the weapons necessary for compliance, while doing damage to other groups, creating inefficiency and additional work for everyone involved.

To avoid this “magic bullet” syndrome, look for three basic characteristics when evaluating a holistic financial governance software package:

• Extensibility:
  • A modular application architecture should allow your business to “start small” (often in the area causing your business the most pain) and grow into compliance over time. Evaluate the vendor’s responsiveness, the system’s feature set, and your own appetite for radical process transformation prior to moving forward with an enterprise-wide implementation.
• Scalability:
  • Make sure that the solution is capable of growing along with your business. There are many excellent single-point solutions out there which perform well up to a certain user or data threshold, after which they become effectively useless. Don’t let this happen to you.
• Flexibility:
  • Your financial governance process is the most important component of your business and compliance strategy. Too many solutions will require you to cut corners in order to fit your process into a feature set of limited scope. Your process should be supported by the system you select, and not the other way around.

Automation is the critical lifeblood of an effective account reconciliation process. But software can’t solve everything – just as important is the continuous controls improvement process surrounding the software. At Trintech, we’ve identified seven best practices to help our customers ensure an effective, factual, and high quality account reconciliation process. Some of the key elements of each practice are highlighted below.

• 1: Account Assignment
  • Administration must be performed efficiently, either in a decentralized or Centralized environment
  • New accounts are identified automatically ensuring 100% coverage of the GL
  • Ideally Business Units should be empowered, with central visibility and control
• 2: Procedural Documentation
  • Complete account descriptions exist, with supporting controls, policies and rules
  • Document repository contains account and reconciliation history, including attachments
  • Approval and change management workflow is documented
• 3: Timely Reconciliation and Substantiation
  • Live, role-based dashboards track progress in real-time
  • Automated support for account grouping, interactive matching, high-volume transaction matching and search/filter criteria
  • Bulk reconciliation tools support zero balance, no activity, threshold, and Dynamic Risk Ratings
• 4: Issue Isolation
  • Past dues are highlighted automatically, with triggered notifications to users and managers
  • Audit trail captures all commentary and notes
  • High risk accounts are flagged for continuous monitoring
• 5: Issue Escalation and Resolution
  • An automated and collaborative escalation workflow exists
  • Configurable reporting features capture all facts
  • Item aging and carry-forward rules exist, enabling lock-down on completed work
• 6: Adjust with Integrity
  • A highly controlled adjustment workflow exists: including creation, review, and approval
  • Reconciliations are re-performed when balances change
  • Controlled closure of open items
• 7: Empowered Personnel
  • Standardized reconciliation templates, with built-in account certification and confirmation
  • Easily accessible reference information to ensure high-quality reconciliations
  • Continuous and inclusive audit trail

Strategic companies won’t view SOX compliance as just another box to be checked off. They will instead approach the account reconciliation process with a best-practices mixture of tools, processes, and attitude that ensures not only compliance, but savings in hours, effort, and fees … all of which translates directly to the bottom line.

Over the next few weeks, we will take a look at each of the 7 elements above and focus closer in to highlight areas of efficiency, automation and ultimately 20/20 transparency and accountability.

PCI-DSS is comprised of 12 discrete requirements, dictating how card processors handle everything from network security standards to data encryption:

• 1. Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
• 2. Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters
• 3. Protect stored cardholder data
• 4. Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
• 5. Use and regularly update anti-virus software on all systems commonly affected by malware
• 6. Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
• 7. Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
• 8. Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
• 9. Restrict physical access to cardholder data
• 10. Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
• 11. Regularly test security systems and processes
• 12. Maintain a policy that addresses information security

Compliance is assessed each year by card issuers and acquirers (think Visa, Mastercard, AMEX), with organizations who process large volumes of credit card transactions (more than 6 million transactions in any given year) subject to an annual on-site audit and quarterly network scans by an approved Qualified Security Assessor. Smaller businesses can self-certify via a Self-Assessment Questionnaire.

Penalties for non-compliance can be stiff, with fines of up to $500,000 and the financial and legal headache resulting from audits, legal action from leaked data – not to mention the embarrassing public relations issue which can arise if cardholder data is breached. Businesses who continue to fail compliance tests can lose their ability to process credit card transactions altogether.

What To Look For In A PCI-DSS Compliance Solution

A flexible compliance solution will be key to successful PCI-DSS compliance. If you’re already using a compliance tool for SOX, first examine whether or not it can be configured to manage PCI-DSS compliance efforts as well. Standalone PCI-DSS solutions will be rare. It’s interesting to note that PCI-DSS is enforced separately by issuing organizations – so even though the standard exists to streamline your compliance efforts, each organization may require slightly different sets of documentation. Your solution should include the ability to upload published PCI-DSS control libraries, allowing you to record any nuances by card issuer, and offer electronic delivery of all required documentation with the click of a button.

PCI-DSS, like so many other regulations, is here to stay. Strategic businesses will integrate compliance with the standard into a culture of compliance and, like SOX compliance, learn to leverage these discrete compliance checks within a broader process improvement initiative … helping them do things faster, better and smarter in the Office of Finance.