Internal and external auditing for a company is a stressful time for everyone involved. As a CFO or Global Controller, you want to show that your teams have conducted efficient financial close processes throughout the year to deliver accurate and reliable financial statements. As Preparers and Approvers, you have the task of providing all necessary supporting documents and addressing all questions or concerns brought up by the auditors. Auditors, whether they are internal or external, both have the task of reviewing all transactions, accounts, balances, journals, and supporting documents to identify any inaccuracies or potential fraud. This whole process can be, and is oftentimes, very tedious and stressful, but it doesn’t have to be. 

By connecting your System of Record, such as your ERP, to our Cadency solution via our dedicated ERP Connectors, you gain a multitude of efficiencies, and you’ll quickly find that manual processes are reduced or even eliminated to create a more streamlined business. This System of Integration helps with validating, posting, and reversing Journal Entries from Cadency directly to your ERP in real time. Additionally, Cadency recently released a new “drill-back” feature to augment our System of Integrations, allowing a user in SAP® to navigate directly to the journal details in Cadency without having to use the search functions.  In doing this, the SAP® user can view all documents, notes, and details in Cadency Journal Entry, allowing Cadency to be your centralized organizer for the financial close process. This integration of systems creates heightened team efficiency and effectiveness and will also result in decreased cost and risk. 

Prior to implementing our System of Accounting Intelligence™ (SOAI), the process for an auditor would look something as follows: An auditor finds a discrepancy in the system of record and takes note of the document number. The auditor would then have to traverse through many excel sheets and emails provided by your employees until they found the supporting evidence that was needed. This process is the same for any SAP® user or manager that may need to reference back to those supporting materials. 

Now with Cadency, all necessary supporting materials are attached to the Journal Entry, and the new drill back capability streamlines the process to reduce the amount of time and effort needed by the auditor and your employees. This is because they would simply navigate to the attachments of the entry in question, click on the hyperlink to Cadency which would then open Cadency directly to the Journal Entry. 

Trintech’s research has found that each time this feature is used, it reduces 5 steps in the overall process. This reduction in steps and searching leads to a more streamlined audit with our System of Accounting Intelligence covering all your bases.

See how you and your team can benefit from the drill back function: 

 

Written by: Charles Hitt, Technical Associate Product Owner