As the Office of Finance continues to transform to meet the evolving needs of today, we have seen several roles undergo a transformation such as the CFO. Traditionally, their focus was on accounting, financial reporting, and compliance. Today, CFOs play a more strategic role where they help drive the direction and success of their organizations using their knowledge and understanding of the financial position of the company. However, these legacy activities are still critical to the close and must be done, so they are now just having to more with fewer resources. Given this reality, organizations are looking for ways to automate these mundane activities in their close process to free up valuable resources for more cognitive activities such as analysis and decision making.

Trintech is helping many firms streamline their period-end close process by using innovative, disruptive technologies to automate close tasks within customer’s ERPs such as Oracle EBS. As an example, executing the “Depreciation Posting Run” is a part of the period-end closing process that is traditionally performed by the finance and accounting (F&A) team. It is a cumbersome and tedious process that needs to be performed thoroughly for each entity within the organization and can take hundreds of hours of manual effort every close.

Manual Deprecation Posting Run Process

The below diagram depicts the typical manual steps involved in the depreciation posting process:

1. Use in-house tools such as email and spreadsheets to manage workflow for close tasks and manually keep track of the execution status
2. Log into the ERP instance and execute periodic asset postings
3. Execute depreciation run in test mode
4. Extract depreciation simulation reports, asset change masters and analyze logs for any errors and then perform variance analysis by comparing the current data to last period data
5. Execute depreciation run in production mode and check logs to confirm it ran successfully
6. Update the status of the task

This manual process is very tedious and not only increases the time and cost of completing the depreciation posting but also significantly increases the risk of errors potentially requiring rework. Trintech can help streamline and automate this process, reducing the cost and risk simultaneously.

How Cadency’s System of Accounting Intelligence Can Help

Now, you may wonder why you should invest in another solution when they have already made investments in expensive ERP systems, other 3rd-party RPA tools, and home-grown custom solutions within their ERP. ERP systems like Oracle EBS do a great job at what they were created for, which is being a System of Record, but lack the automation and controls needed for an effective and efficient period end-close process. You can solve some of these challenges by developing custom automation and integration using 3rd-party RPA tools, but most customizations are prohibitively expensive and fail to provide futureproofing.

For example, when a simple screen resolution changes or UI updates, these small changes can cause various automation to break easily. What your organization needs is to take a deeper look into a comprehensive System of Accounting Intelligence™ (SOAI) platform that includes:

• System of Integration – Leverage purpose-built ERP and JE connectors for major ERPs and APIs
• System of Controls – Automate key Record to Report processes including Reconciliation (Balance Sheet, Intercompany and High-Volume), Journal Entry, Close and Compliance processes that are designed to provide seamless workflow from one process to another
• System of Automation – Apply innovative Risk Intelligent RPA™, such as Dynamic Account Maintenance, Dynamic Approval Routing, etc., to your processes, as well as, a suite of ERP Bots which provide native automation within leading ERPs to provide journal entry automation and close task automation
• Financial Controls AI™ (FC-AI) – Use machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to examine trends in your data over time, identify abnormalities, and automate workflows based on the associated risk

Trintech’s Cadency solution provides a multitude of offerings that are simply unmatched in the Record to Report space. With an extensive roadmap that is continuously being updated based on market feedback and internal R&D, our customers can rest assured that they can grow with Trintech as their business needs continue to evolve over the years.

Automated Depreciation Posting Run Process

In the “Depreciation Posting Run” example, Cadency provides a seamless and completely touchless process by leveraging Cadency Close Process (System of Controls), Close Action Plan Router (System of Integration) and ERP Bots (System of Automation) to enhance controls and automation. With Cadency, your depreciation posting run will look like this:

• Use Cadency Close to manage period end close tasks (both manual as well as automated) and its workflow
• Cadency Close triggers the automated task using the Close Action Plan Router (APR) integration
• Use Cadency’s out-of-the-box ERP Bots to run periodic asset posting and depreciation posting natively within the ERPs like Oracle EBS.
• ERP Bots use text analytics to analyze depreciation reports, and then log and calculate variances as an additional parameter to check the correctness of run.
• ERP Bots use Close APR to update task status in Cadency Close
• Cadency Close triggers the next task set up in the close task plan

This is what the fully automated touchless close process looks like after implementing our Cadency solution:

Adopting the above approach streamlines the period-end close process and frees up valuable human resources that can be allocated towards cognitive tasks as the demands of the CFO organization continues to grow to become a more strategic player. This automation of “Depreciation Posting Run” will alone save the Office of Finance thousands of hours every year while reducing the risk and cost of performing these manual tasks.

For more information on how Cadency can transform your Office of Finance, contact us.