Why is Security Important?
There are thousands of journal entries managed by corporations every close cycle that span across countries and shared service centers. Journal entries are important because they can make small or large changes to the P/L and balance sheet information a company uses to report to the management, public markets, auditors and others. Errors in these financial reports can result in poor business decisions, enabling fraud or other very negative business outcomes. Managing rights to these journals helps reduce risk by only allowing certain users access to the journals.

Journal Entry (JE) Data Profiles
Controlling viewing and editing rights based on just the role of a person can be a challenging and manual effort that can also be risky, hence why adding a feature like JE Data Profiles is essential to JE security management and helps us mitigate several problems.

Data Profiles is a part of Cadency’s System of Controls that helps facilitate financial, IT and security controls and automation by displaying and giving accessibility to transactions to the proper user. Cadency Data Profiles increases the reach of your System of Controls into the System of Automation by expanding JE security groups to provide the ability to create security groups based on data from the journals, helping facilitate a faster time to close.

Customer Scenario
As an example, let’s say a company has a requirement to have all journals for their Havana location to be processed and posted by the 15^th of every month. You are the assigned approver for a lot of these journals, and you suddenly have too many journals to approve, you are not sure if you will make the deadline. Previously, a Cadency admin could create security groups based on roles for approver and preparers but were unable to create groups based on data from the journals leading to a high volume of security groups to control access.

Using JE Data Profiles, accessibility can be easily provided to other approvers based on attributes like Company Code and Location to help you prevent bottlenecks, especially during a period end when approvers have many journals to approve, hence reducing cost and increasing efficiency.

JE Data Profiles provide a simpler way of managing security access control and creating groups for journals that align to company policies and procedures, allowing users to review/approve journals within their group to help lower risk and increase effectiveness.

“We currently maintain approximately 350 security groups and have had issues with approval hierarchy and approving the wrong journals, we hope data profiles will help us prevent these issues.” – Leading Health Technology Provider

JE Data Profiles is a feature that will allow our customers to have better control over their Cadency journal entry and the ability to organize, expand and make it scalable for large complex organizations, and ensure company policies are being followed to strengthen IT and financial controls.

The End Result
This Cadency functionality decreases overall financial risk by helping ensure per policy, the right users see the right journal. Efficiency is also gained in knowing technology is driving policy and preventing risk, freeing staff to focus on other high-risk activities. This also enhances security and controls for JE preparers, collaborators and administrators and streamlines maintenance without worrying about assigning incorrect security group to a user profile. The new hierarchy option available now in the user maintenance page ensures that an approver is only able to approve journals for someone in their hierarchy level or below and does not have the option to approve journals that have been routed to be approved by someone in a higher hierarchy.

Feature Capability:  

• New page to create and maintain data profiles with easy to follow steps
• New system defined fields “Company Code” and “Location” with the ability to add pick list values
• New hierarchy option on user maintenance page
• New view option on the journal entry dashboard to view journals from your security, providing the ability to check the status of all journals in your company code or location

To learn more about Cadency Journal Entry, read our brochure here.

 

Written by: Muna Syed