Background
In today’s digital economy, demand for immediate access to accurate financial data increases constantly. Internal management, parent companies, regulatory authorities, and other external stakeholders now expect almost real-time availability of accounting statements and management information. However, the ability of many finance professionals to deliver effectively is often hindered by divergent accounting standards, currency complications, overseas jurisdiction needs, and even multiple accounting systems.
Many ERP-products, excellent at line-of-business operations, and with solid core accounting, are often challenged by constantly evolving global financial compliance requirements. They increasingly look to specialist partner solutions – particularly in areas such as tax and financial reporting – to provide local controllers with tools needed to respond appropriately.
Challenge
In distributed corporations, global controllers must regularly consolidate data from multiple ERP-systems, navigate different chart of accounts structures, and deal with multiple currencies. They need to support the decision-making needs of internal management, while also creating GAAP-* and IFRS-compliant** consolidated financial statements for external audiences such as auditors, banks, investors, and analysts.
Individual company accountants also need to balance internal management reporting formats, with frequently conflicting disclosure requirements of local authorities. And as national governments in a growing number of countries look to protect revenue sources and expose fraudulent activity, they have created additional burdens by requiring electronic tracking of individual transactions and almost real-time electronic report submission.
Solution
Products like Mondial CRx, a web-based subscription service from Mondial Software, help customers bridge the gap from traditional reporting to today’s need for immediacy and accuracy at all levels.
Mondial CRx consolidates transaction-level data – General Ledger, Accounts Payable, and Accounts Receivable – from each ERP-system, located anywhere globally, into its multi-ledger accounting repository, making data from every group operation available immediately on a consistent and easy-to-understand basis.
The repository is enhanced through transaction-level currency adjustments, and the creation of final adjustment journals – revaluations, adjustments, reallocations – when this is difficult to accomplish in underlying systems. This allows Mondial CRx to offer a true system-of-record, reducing audit risk when compared with ERP systems that require additional spreadsheet adjustments, or Business Intelligence products that produce financial reports based only on balance-level data.
The accounting data is automatically mapped from disparate source charts of account to common group standards, or to formats required by regulatory authorities, meaning that data is always ready for easy and consistent reporting.
The complete accounting dataset can also be utilized for broader decision support using industry-standard analytical and business intelligence tools, and with all reporting based on a “single source-of-truth” there is consistency in the information used across the enterprise.
