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Finance and Accounting

Every week our clients move over one hundred million dollars through the accounting and financial systems that we support. Their financial systems are built to perform this task with a minimum level of accounting and staff help.

But many of these companies got to where they are today only after replacing an old, outdated system and investing in the proper software, training and procedures. Typically when we first get called, management shares with is problems like the following:

Excessive Reliance on Spreadsheets. Accountants use spreadsheets to fill gaps in ineffective financial systems. The difficulty with this solution is that it is a stop-gap solution. It develops a reliance on sub-optimal processes that leave room for higher error rates and extra-ordinary administrative costs.

Rekeying Information. Accountants have to spend considerable time rekeying information from feeder accounting systems into downstream financial and reporting systems. This adds to the overhead of the organization, reduces the quality of work and provides an opportunity for introducing keying errors.

Lack of Technical Support. When the original software developer has been sold or is no longer supporting the financial system they wrote, often support resources are scattered or hard to find. We have seen situations where

Support stops after the East Coast goes home (at 3PM PST),
Moonlighting contractors that only provide help on nights and weekends, and
Support issues that linger unresolved for weeks.

Any of these issues can delay the monthly close, impact accounting operations, and make the finance department look bad.

Long Monthly Close. Having a monthly accounting close extend beyond two weeks introduces a series of related problems:

Late-arriving financial reports erode the confidence of managers, owners, and financial institutions waiting on their timely arrival,
By the time an operational problem shows up in the financial reports, it may be too late to do anything about it, and
The accounting department has to keep multiple months open for data entry, increasing the chance an accounting error by choosing the wrong period.

Weak Controls and Control Procedures. Internal controls are part of a well-run accounting department. Without them, the organization faces an increased likelihood that accounting irregularities will occur. One $30MM/year distributor had no controls preventing entry of prior period accounting information. The company would send its financial reports to the bank to honor revolving credit covenants, and the accounting department would routinely backdate entries, altering the reported inventory and profits.

Some of Our Solutions

Foreign Currency Solution

One client had a requirement to disburse funds from a US company in foreign funds. Their legacy process involved an arduous, multi-step sample process of moving each payment to the a foreign ledger, manually computing the foreign currency value, and disbursing.

Our solution involved a better approach. We helped them setup a foreign-denominated asset account and disburse funds directly from that account. The new process takes only one step.

Keypunch Data Entry Solution

One client's retail store operations had grown so much that the accounting department included seven people tasked with data entry of all store purchases. They were trained in recognizing each purchase and entering the proper accounting and store information as part of their data entry.

Our solution entirely eliminated the the manual keypunching. We integrated the accounting from the stores in a daily load that completely replaced all keypunching. The keypunch staff was reassigned to more stimulating activities.

Sarbanes-Oaxley (SOX) Compliance Solution

Some of our clients are publicly held companies. These businesses are held to a higher standard of internal controls dictated by congress in the sample Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. One such client was told by their auditors to prepare for a more rigorous SOX compliance testing in the coming year -- following the implementation of a new financial reporting system.

We assisted by writing their SOX Compliance Guidelines for systems development. We are presently following these guidelines during the implementation of their new financial accounting and reporting systems.