Due to growth through mergers and acquisitions, aggressive expansion during high growth periods and historical local system purchasing decisions, most finance organizations struggle to maintain a heterogenous ERP application portfolio. “Several of our large, enterprise-class customers that have chosen to partner with SAP® still identify challenges in regards to their financial close process due to the manual aggregation of information for period-end reporting that sits outside the ERP,” says Teresa Mackintosh, CEO at Trintech. “This manual work makes it incredibly difficult for companies to effectively deliver the required information for shareholder/investor and regulatory reporting, leading to high risk across the process and the business.” Having to rework the numbers after the close, incurring re-audit fees from third party auditors, re-statements of earnings and fines from governing bodies become all too common. So, what can be done to reduce this extensive manual effort and ensure standardization of processes and integrity of financial data?
Ensuring the Integrity of Your Financial Close Process with Cadency®
While the ERP plays a significant role in the management and automation of daily operations, it lacks the functionality to handle the complexity of the financial close process. With Trintech’s enterprise-class cloud-based solution, Cadency®, financial executives have the world’s only finance governance solution that integrates seamlessly into their existing ERP systems, specifically SAP®, to streamline all of the Record to Report (R2R) activities into a single, process. It provides you with the means of collating all the critical data in a single view, and can eliminate those white spaces that sit outside the ERP by providing pre-built Connectors and agnostic integration capabilities to standardize across the business. From automating and managing balance sheet reconciliations, managing intercompany workflow and transactions, journal entries, disclosure and fiduciary reporting and bank fee analysis, to governance, risk and compliance – Trintech’s Cadency solution optimizes resources, reduces cost and improves governance and transparency across the entire financial close process.
Through its Risk Intelligent Robotic Process Automation™ capabilities, Cadency allows finance executives to succeed in a changing environment by exhibiting controlled agility – “controlled”, to ensure the highest level of data accuracy and integrity in financial close data, and “agility”, to adapt to and meet organizational changes that mitigate risk. This single end-to-end solution delivers real-time visibility into the financial close for the C-Suite, producing data-driven insights to propel strategic growth.
With all this information in one place, an executive console delivers real-time transparency and instant visibility to senior executives, enabling them to oversee the current status and make decisions and deliver actions before they impact the numbers. This also allows all financial close stakeholders across the organizations, in and around the world, to easily communicate and collaborate, creating real-time communities across the Office of Finance.
Industry Visionaries Partner with Trintech
Trintech has an impressive customer base with over 1,700 clients worldwide – including the majority of the Fortune 100 – relying on it’s cloud-based software to help integrate into their existing ERP systems and drive valuable insights across their business, while leaving the manual and non-judgmental tasks for the robots.
Siemens Corporation: Siemens launched a project to “bundle” its regional infrastructure functions. The objectives of this project were to improve efficiency and compliance and to standardize on a common set of processes. Siemens looked to its Global Shared Services organization to play a key role in the success of this project. When the project kicked off, the account reconciliation process was very decentralized amongst each of the company’s business units. Many locations relied on Excel and multiple shared directories to perform general ledger account reconciliations. Siemens wanted an efficient, automated solution that could integrate with its complex ERP environment to deliver best-in-class account reconciliation services to its various business units.
“When evaluating vendors to partner with, it was very important to us that we had tight integration with our ERP environment. In North America alone, we support 17 SAP instances as well as other ERPs and GL packages. Trintech uniquely met our integration needs with minimal IT involvement, across our diverse SAP deployment.” said Rob Koca, Corporate Controller at Siemens.
Since implementing Cadency, Siemens has been able to reconcile 100% of its GL account and subledgers in the solution, while also reducing its overall cost to deliver by 20%. It has automated the creation, review and approval of journal entries, dramatically improving the quality and reliability of the output. Siemens continues a close partnership with Trintech in order to discover further ways in which the solution can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the financial close.
AstraZeneca: AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical company, with manufacturing, distribution and research facilities in more than 100 countries, generating $23 billion in annual revenue. The company supports a global workforce of more than 57,000 people, and utilizes five regional SAP ERP instances throughout Europe, Latin America, North America and AsiaPacifc regions. Achieving global standardization and strengthening its compliance was AstraZeneca’s main priority in its transformation project, as it faced severe risk managing a $52 billion balance sheet in Excel.
Since implementing Cadency, AstraZeneca has discovered $2.5 million in savings, improved the productivity of its 300 users, and eliminated Excel spreadsheets, paper and manual effort. The company has increased compliance across 26,000 accounts and saved around 850 hours each month.
“Now, the Cadency dashboard will show when a reconciliation is due, who is responsible for its review and approval, and where it is in the system. If it’s not completed as expected, there are alerts. It’s easy to identify issues and get into root-cause analysis if people aren’t meeting deadlines.” — Natalie Childs, Global Process Owner, Record-to-Report and Fixed Assets, AstraZeneca.
Meet the CEO of Trintech Teresa Mackintosh, is the CEO of Trintech and has over 20 years of experience working with the Accounting, Tax and Finance functions of companies worldwide, helping them to be a catalyst for organizational innovation. Mackintosh began her career as a CPA at PwC and has since held several senior leadership roles in the finance and accounting space. She has experience serving a multitude of business units across Thomson Reuters with responsibilities ranging from product development to general management. Prior to joining Trintech, Mackintosh served as Chief Executive Officer at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting in the U.S. She has been recognized as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting,” and has also been named to the “Most Powerful Women in Accounting” list several times. Mackintosh received both her BBA and MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
