UNIT4 Coda Financials

UNIT4 Coda Financials is an award-winning suite of best-of-class financial management software designed to integrate with your industry- and company-specific applications. UNIT4 Coda Financials provides real-time financial visibility and control across people, processes and systems. By acting as the financial information backbone for companies with fast-changing and mixed application environments, it offers a 'no compromise' approach to financial modeling, process controls and application choice.

Video Overview

UNIT4 Coda Financials has led the field since 1979, when it created the original single ledger accounting system. The software makes it easier to handle the day-to-day number crunching but also ensures that your fundamental business data is accurate, consistent and up to date, because it is held within one financial model & eliminating time lags, subledgers, reconciling and unnecessary integration.

And the more demanding or complex your requirements, UNIT4 Coda Financials rises to the challenge. It delivers all the multi-everything (country, company, currency, language, deployment) capabilities that you need, as well as the most flexible chart of account modeling structure on the market, providing infinite ways to classify, measure, and analyze your business.

UNIT4 Coda Financials also allows you to automate and integrate processes lying outside your core financial systems. The software is designed to control and, where possible, automate both task- and document -based activities into a self documenting workflow. This makes processes more visible, repeatable, and auditable. And thanks to its service-oriented architecture, UNIT4 Coda Financials offers easy integration with vertical or company-specific business systems via Web Services, giving you the foundation for organization-wide processes and access to financial information.

UNIT4 Coda Financials excels in fast-paced, rapidly changing environments such as: Business Services; Financial Services; Transportation and Logistics; Media & Publishing; Oil and Gas; Retail and Leisure; Multi-site; Multi-national; Shared Services

Accounts Payable

• Streamlined "req-to-check" process
• Time-saving document entry templates
• Multi-company, Multi-currency, Multi-tax:
  • Company, dual, account(s), supplier and document currencies
  • VAT, GST, PST etc.
• Flexible supplier analysis by location, product, service, buyer etc.
• Supplier actual-to-budget analysis
• Multiple supplier locations
• Supports shared services operations
• Flexible payment and cash conservation options: Early payment discounts
• Electronic and physical check options
• Automatic bank reconciliation
• 3-way invoice matching:
  • Links PO, GRNs, Returns, Credit notes and Invoices
  • Reduces data entry; ensures accuracy
  • Instills authorization and payment controls
  • Automated or user-initiated matching
• E-invoicing
• Recurring and automatic invoices
• InTray for transaction previews and approval before posting
• Image processing and attachments:
  • Integration with OCR and scanned invoice images
  • Image attachments available from drill-down
• Customer refund processing -- pay A/R refund items and credit balances
• Trade partner or agent netting
• Pass through & reimbursable expenses posted directly to A/R
• Employee expense processing

Accounts Receivable

• Streamlined order-to-cash process
• Interactive, assisted and automated cash matching:
  • Lockbox processing support
  • Credit and collections management:
  • Full online view of customer history
  • User-defined aging
  • Visibility of customer activity across companies
  • Prioritize and identify exception accounts
  • User-defined credit manager and collection agent views
  • Full diary of actions taken, reminders, conversations and follow up notes
  • Unlimited action or reason codes
  • Credit statistics include:
    • Item count
    • Average value
    • Average days
    • Weighted average days
    • High value
    • Low value
    • Days' sales outstanding
  • Specify interest charges on overdue accounts and items
  • Flexible reminder or dunning letters
• Supports shared services
• Multi-company, Multi-currency, Multi-tax:
  • Company, dual, account(s), supplier and document currencies
  • VAT, GST, PST etc.
• Customer profitability and analysis:
  • Analyze and apply cash by location, product, salesperson, quantities, service etc.
• Customer refund processing:
  • Pay refund items and credit balances directly from A/R
• Trade partner or agent netting
• Pass through reimbursable expenses to customers directly from A/P

Billing

• Intuitive time entry and recording:
  • Employee time and expenses
  • Mileage registration
  • Flexible rate models
• Authorization workflow
• Multicompany and Multicurrency:
  • Automatic intercompany balancing
• Flexible work breakdown structure via CODA Financials model
• Budget controls:
  • Budget overage warnings and email notification
• Supports Blackberry or PDA data entry and inquiry
• Order book:
  • One-off and recurring charges
• Flexible invoicing:
  • Guided editing and approval
  • Write-offs, reclassifications, reminders
  • PDF and Word support
• Service planning

Budgeting

Most General Ledger systems can store relatively simplistic account-level budgets. Others are limited by the flexibility of the chart of accounts or rigid "code blocks" offered within the system. Chart inflexibility limits the ability to budget at more detailed and operational levels.

CODA Financials goes far beyond the traditional view of budgeting by allowing users to create a financial model of their business inside their finance system. This begins with the ability to track actuals and budgets against an unlimited array of account coding schemes. For instance, the CODA chart of accounts can accommodate completely different account coding schemes within the same company. This allows each line of business to measure profitability and budget performance the way it needs to, yet provides a single reporting model or ledger -- that is always in balance. In the CODA financial model, budgets can follow a typical profit and loss format, mirror your operational structure, or provide deep product analysis -- the only limit is your imagination.

Budget Granularity Provides More Insights

Once the chart of accounts is in place, budgets can be established at all different levels of your chart of accounts, including combinations of accounts. These budget dimensions can also include iterations for currencies, budget revisions and forecasts. To summarize, this granular budgeting ability allows you to set up more precise business metrics to accurately measure your corporate performance.

Consolidation & Cash Management

Group Consolidation

• Users are guided through consolidation as a step-by-step process flow
• Consolidation levels are fully integrated and "in sync" -- changes instantly roll up into the higher levels and are also available for drill-down from above
• Ability to create group accounts for associated companies
• Ability to make group adjustments using multiple dimensions, with drill-down analysis
• Processing of inter-company accounts with multiple dimensions
• Help with the identification and elimination of inter-company positions
• Automatic foreign exchange conversion, based on current or temporal method
• Automatic calculation of unrestricted equity on consolidation
• Allocation facilities enable shared costs to be divided up between companies
• Users can make group adjustments with commentary and audit trail
• Ability to cater for complex ownership positions such as Minority Interests and Associated Companies
• Easy management of re-organizations, acquisitions, re-forecasts and structural changes

Performance Reporting

• Reporting and consolidation of actual, budgeted, and forecast figures; unlimited versions of measures
• Multi-dimensional reporting
• Status reports for monitoring the closing process
• Shared reports -- reports can be stored centrally, for each user to access and adapt as required
• Relational OLAP -- integrated in CODA Financials -- provides users with unique reporting options
• Add-in modules: Balanced Scorecard, EVA, * Ranking Analysis, Key Business Ratios, Benchmarking, "What if" analysis and other "CPM" metrics
• Built-in Report Viewer enables users to retrieve and analyze data by applying or adapting existing reports that have been set up centrally. These reports can take the form of either tables or charts and can be printed out and/or exported to Microsoft Excel^®
• With Ad Hoc Reporting, data within the solution can be displayed and analyzed using familiar Microsoft® Excel® tools -- delivering flexible reporting on transparent, accurate data but without the weaknesses of spreadsheet analysis
• In addition, a range of optional add-in components are available for advanced modeling and analysis, to meet even the most sophisticated corporate performance management (CPM) requirements.

Cash Management

• With the click of a button, the Intercompany Netting module can usually eliminate more than 90% of all intercompany payments -- reducing the number of transactions to a minimum, together with the associated transfer costs, such as transaction fees and bank float.
• Enables easy and efficient forecasting and posting of cash-flows in individual currencies -- both for the parent company and for individual subsidiaries -- down to week- or day-levels.

Integration and Input

• All Consolidation modules work seamlessly with each other and deliver fast and simple integration with finance systems, ERP systems, CRM systems and other data sources
• The standard import module also supports XML files, for added flexibility
• Data-entry forms can be quickly and easily designed using familiar Microsoft® Excel® tools and conventions.

Technical Features

• Optimized for rapid implementation and efficient software upgrades
• The "Explorer" provides a simple browser-type interface
• Shared but secure access to all data on a single, central server
• Users can connect via their Local Area Network or online -- via a secure Internet-based or VPN login Microsoft SQL Server database
• Online controllers' manual and context-sensitive help within data-entry forms.

Fixed Assets

• Integral to the CODA solution's single financial model -- no batch updates, always in balance
• Track assets across multiple companies, currencies and "books"
• Flexible and standard depreciation rules:
  • Any number of user-defined depreciation rules
  • Plug-ins for global coverage
• User-defined tracking, categorization
• Disposals: full or partial
• Transfer assets -- either between cost centers or to create a new asset
• Revaluate appreciating assets and post the financial transactions to separate revaluation accounts:
  • Revalue by value, percentage or a customizable rule
• Forecast future year depreciation charges:
  • Export forecasts to a spreadsheet or to CODA balance codes for further analysis or reporting.
• Real-time enquiry facility to view exact financial status
• Supports all methods of asset creation, including: bulk loading; automatic creation from an invoice; or customized manual entry:
  • Mass loading of assets from an external system using XML
  • Direct cost transfers from G/L WIP to Assets
• InTray facility allows the initial entry of asset details for subsequent authorization and capitalization
• Users can browse customized lists of assets, with comprehensive drill-down to view full asset details, associated transactions and financial postings
• Assets can hold values in multiple currencies. This means that you can:
  • capitalize an asset from CODA Financials and record the cost of the asset in the currencies captured from CODA Financials
  • create an asset manually and hold all its values in one or more additional currencies
  • calculate depreciation based on the historic rates
  • calculate full and partial disposals based on the historic rates
  • revalue assets and forecast depreciation for assets in multiple currencies
  • transfer assets, with their values being cleared down and reinstated in all currencies
  • post transactions into CODA Financials using the currency values calculated in Assets.

General Ledger

Unrivalled Account Code and Roll-Up Structure:

• Complete flexibility to capture and analyze financial data
• Variable-length alphanumeric codes
• Ability to analyze lines of business, products, services etc. differently
• Set up charts to reflect the way you work and operate
• Built for reporting
• Unlimited account groupings and hierarchies
• Easy one-to-many maintenance
• Comprehensive account security and functional security

Multi-Dimensional Financial Model:

• Dimensions to capture multiple currencies, account balances, budgets, forecasts, supplier activity, customer activity, and business statistics.

Multi-Everything Within a Single Instance:

• Multi: country, company, currency, tax, language
• Accommodates local accounting requirements
• Company, dual, account(s) and document currencies
• Automated revaluation routines

Automatic Intercompany

Advanced Allocations:

• Unlimited rules
• Access to all dimensions, such as statistics, budgets etc.
• "Front-end" and "Back-end" allocations
• Time-saving document templates
• InTray for transaction previews and approval before posting
• Unparalleled online browse capabilities
• Secure integration and reporting with Microsoft Excel

Integration & Web Services

CODA Financials -- Designed for Integration

The CODA Link" integration architecture is second to none, using modern techniques such as web services and XML to provide secure, real-time integration to your other operational systems. In a best-of-class application ecosystem, the Link" architecture exposes all business logic and financial validation to other applications, providing accounting functionality as an internal service or in an internal cloud as needed. Companies can build their own specialized applications and use CODA Financials as an accounting component or as a financial hub. This allows companies to concentrate on adding value to their specialized systems, while simultaneously benefiting from a great financial software package.

Link" Integration Tools and Components

UNIT4 CODA has always provided unrivalled integration tools to support its best-of-class accounting engine. Now, any of your software systems can interactively "talk to" your financial system -- no matter what hardware platforms, operating systems and programming languages are involved. Unit4 Business Software has taken integration to a new level by delivering the full range of application functionality in a web services architecture.

Web Services -- APIs Over a Network

CODA Financials web services provide two-way Internet-based integration, which enables each individual component and function of the application to receive and respond to requests for it to operate, via secure internet URLs. This is made possible by the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) used throughout the application. Its complete flexibility makes it easy to develop interfaces to update, validate or extract financial data.

Capabilities include:

• user authentication, sign-on and sign-off
• account validation
• financial transaction posting (journals, vouchers, invoices, credit notes, etc.) including real-time validation and account balance updates across all affected ledgers
• master file inquiry and updates e.g. foreign exchange rates, customer and vendor address details, project attributes, etc.
• powerful inquiry and reporting capabilities at either the account balance level (e.g. request summarized income statement for a business unit or product line) or transaction detail level (e.g. request list of unpaid invoices for a specified customer)
• fixed asset inquiries and updates
• accounting functions available as a service (such as reconciliation) to external applications.

The potential benefits for UNIT4 CODA customers, system integrators and industry-specific solution providers of adopting CODA Financials in a web services architecture are enormous. Proven world-class financial accounting functionality can now be rapidly embedded within an overall solution, with client and "feeder" servers running on any operating system (Windows®, LINUX, J2EE, IBM, mobile platforms) or device form factor (desktop PC, web browser, server, mainframe, mobile device or handheld). With no UNIT4 CODA software required on the client devices and a de-coupled, standard-based programming interface, different components of the overall solution can be upgraded and modified independently to meet changing business requirements.

XMLi - Flexibility to Link Data, Functions or Whole Programs

With the growing use of XML as the standard way to exchange data between applications, UNIT4 CODA created its XMLi linking tools to create an extremely flexible interface between the financial application and other business systems. It opens up the functionality of the CODA Financials server, to enable the reading, writing and routing of XML documents for individual or bulk data transfers. For maximum flexibility, the in-built XML router can be accessed via various interfaces to provide ready-made compatibility with the most common software system environments.

Table Link -- Integration for Users

Table Link is a simple tool for getting data in and out of financials, day to day -- without needing IT intervention. Table Link routes data between external systems and your CODA Financials application, via intermediary tables from which the data is then routed into the correct database tables of your CODA Financials application. It performs all the data validation and business rule checks as if you entered the data yourself. Table link is ideal for bulk data and master record loading.

Project Accounting

• Integral to the financial model -- no reconciling
• Internal or external projects or jobs
• Flexible coding structure:
  • i.e. Accounts, work breakdown structure, tasks, projects, jobs, phases, locations etc.
• Budget at all levels and combinations of the project coding structure
• Statistical and quantity tracking at all levels of the coding structure:
  • User-defined tracking of: hours, days, volumes, miles, units, length, gallons etc.
• Projects and work breakdown values available in multiple currencies:
  • Company, dual, account(s), supplier and document currencies
• Advanced allocations to and from G/L
• Direct entry from G/L, A/P, A/R, P/O, Billing and F/A
• WIP to F/A transfers
• Real-time actual vs. budget variance
• Complete drill-down to source documents in G/L, A/P, A/R, Billing

Reports and Multidimensional Analysis

It is essential to provide reporting and BI capabilities that match the needs and technology preferences of the many types of users in your organization.

Coda Financials provides both the vital robust, flexible information model and a full array of reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools to help all your different users report on, model and analyze your business -- in the ways that they need.

Browse -- Real-Time Visibility

The browse tool provides powerful reporting and data mining capabilities, including the real-time drill down. Because of the single financial model, users can browse from high level balances down to original source documents without passing through nonsensical summary entries and without missing any transactions due to batch integrations, module updates or balance roll-up routines. For instance, cash balances instantly reflect activity as checks are cut in A/P and cash is received in A/R.

With Coda Financials, you always know your cash position -- up to the minute and down to the penny.

Selectors -- Report Integrity and Reduced Maintenance

Within the Browse functions of Coda Financials, 'Selector' tools give complete central control over:

• which data is used
• how it is stored
• who has access to which areas.

But the Selector is not just limited to Browse. It can be reused in other reporting tools including Microsoft® Excel® via Coda XL. This provides a one-to-many point of maintenance for all reports using a particular Selector. The Selector simplifies report maintenance and ensures a single version of the truth. This, coupled with the flexibility of the Coda Financials 'Presenter' tools, enables individual users to generate customized views of highly summarized data or to drill down to source documents, attachments and images.

Finance Portal -- Controlled, Personalized Information and Tools

With Coda Financials, you can create a "finance portal" that delivers a sensible balance of central control and individual choice, which improves the way a user accesses and interacts with key information. The portal also enables users to decide what programs, functions and other information they can have constantly available on their desktop. This can range from selecting and customizing the Coda Financials product functions that they use, to choosing exactly which types of content -- such as: key performance indicators (KPIs), reporting functions, tools, web pages and other useful information -- to keep at their fingertips. So, the portal for a CFO can display content quite different to that of a line manager or accounting clerk.

Business Intelligence Solutions

There are times when simply viewing or outputting data does not shed enough light on the true state of affairs. Coda can help you move on from what the situation is, to understanding the underlying trends and reasons why.

The business intelligence (BI) applications capitalize on the latest Microsoft® technologies to offer powerful solutions that can be tailored and deployed to suit the scale and complexity of your organization's BI or Corporate Performance Management (CPM) needs.

• Bringing together a broader range of business data for analysis - The Intelligence solution provides a sophisticated analytic framework and database optimized for in-depth, high-volume, offline analysis of financial and other key business data from across the organization. It takes the risk, complexity and delays out of getting an effective datamart solution in place and in action.
• Flexible, straightforward multi-dimensional analysis - Analytic Explorer is a user-friendly but powerful analysis tool that lets you extract key data directly from Financials or from your offline datamart (for example the Intelligence solution) and to analyze and model the figures. It enables users to quickly build multi-dimensional analysis "cubes" of data relevant to their business area and then view and manipulate the results via Microsoft® Excel®.

Requisition

Any purchase-to-pay process involves the moving of key documents and requests around the organization, so that they can be reviewed and approved with the minimum of effort and delay. In each process, there are a number of approval and authorization requirements. Now you can make document, data and task authorization quicker and easier for all involved. An integral part of the Spend Management solution's efficiency is the powerful Workflow application. This is specifically designed to automate cumbersome, repetitive manual administration processes, such as the flow of accounting documents for approval and authorization - sending them direct to the desktops of the people that need them. The integrated system comes with templated workflows, and applies familiar Microsoft® conventions and functions, making it easy for users to work with these powerful tools and get started immediately.

Flexible workflow support not only drives completion of tasks but also keeps participants informed, with permitted users able to see and access approved and pending orders at any time. You can tailor procurement processes to your organization's specific rules and approval hierarchies. Authorizers only receive purchase requests after they have been validated against purchasing rules and budgets, so no time is wasted assessing requests that are unfunded or "outside policy". The result is a truly efficient, online procurement process that allows users to access and share real-time financial and purchasing information.

Outlook Integration

For example, having received an email request for a new piece of equipment, the company buyer can go straight to their procurement toolbar within Outlook to start the sourcing process. Potential suppliers are identified and selected -- that might simply be straight from the Outlook contact list or (if these are in place), the company's approved supplier lists or online catalog.

If an RFQ (request for quotation), requisition or order is raised direct from an email, this original email can be attached to the created document and stored in the central repository, so that it is linked and accessible from that business document, anywhere in the system. This provides an excellent audit trail.

RFQ Creation and Distribution

The RFQ is created either using or adapting the templates provided, or by taking advantage of the system's flexibility, to quickly design specific forms to meet the organization's precise requirements. Having created a single document, it is then sent to each of the selected potential suppliers, as a personalized request -- but without any of them knowing who else has received it.

RFQ Response Handling

Once suppliers have reviewed the RFQ document they click on a hyperlink to enter a secure online form, where they provide their response. The buyer will then receive a system-generated email with a link, which opens up a browser-based Microsoft® Excel® report to review the responses. The buyer can use all of the features of Excel to analyze the information -- e.g. price and delivery dates -- but the data is still securely stored in the Spend Management system.

Integrated Supplier and Order Processing

After an award decision has been made, the buyer simply "sets the preferred supplier". This updates the whole procurement system and (if appropriate) can support commitment and encumbrance accounting by updating your finance system at the same time. The order (another system-generated form) is created with the RFQ information pre-loaded into it. The order can be saved for later, and there is the flexibility to amend it or add new items using the task pane -- once again from the procurement toolbar in Outlook.

Once ready, the purchase order can be sent for approval. Approval routing can be handled either by UNIT4 CODA's own powerful workflow engine, or through Windows workflow, or any other workflow system to suit the organization's broader IT strategy. The exact point(s) at which approvals are sought will vary depending on each organization's own policies; Spend Management gives the complete flexibility to tailor the timing, type and number of approvals to your requirements.

Other Capabilities

• Auditability -- once a purchase order has been approved, built-in version control ensures that any subsequent changes are captured and tracked.
• Flexible output options -- documents can be output directly from a PC, in various formats, including hard copy, email, XML or to a business-to-business server (e.g. Microsoft® BizTalk®).
• User-defined fields -- these can be free-format text or links to accounts
• Document attachments -- delivered with the CODA solution's document repository. The system has the ability to attach documents and images ensuring increased visibility of relevant information.
• Multicurrency -- requisitions can be entered with multiple suppliers and multiple currencies.
• Services and blanket agreements -- supports ordering of services and goods as well as call-offs from blanket agreements.
• Centralized contracts -- the user can set up and enforce contracts with particular suppliers, including date-sensitive pricing, improving efficiency and having key information available when required.
• Item catalog -- information about products is available quickly and easily -- the catalogue can include suggested items, a relevant product hierarchy and a price matrix.
• Punch-out catalog -- users can access items on supplier web sites and return items into Spend Management.

Spend Management

CODA Financials offers you a truly end-to-end spend management solution, covering the whole cycle from requisition through to payment. The Spend Management module reduces costs by providing fast, controlled, online access to key procurement functions to all employees, and also delivers accurate budgetary control over expenditure. It helps a company establish controls and consolidate purchasing activity, and positions it to leverage the full buying power of the organization.

Control

The CODA Spend Management tools are designed to help companies establish electronic controls throughout the process, while reducing the effort it takes to request, order, receive, invoice and pay for an item. By extending procurement functionality to all users and putting managers into an authorization workflow, maverick spend is eliminated and budget accountability is established. With the proper requisitioning and purchase order approval process in place, invoices can be matched up quickly and electronically, without re-keying and unnecessary data entry. Invoice matching also ensures that adequate "goods received" processes are in place and completed before payments for items are made. With the CODA solution, you can be confident in the knowledge that you received what you ordered, and that you are paying for what you actually received.

Consolidate

CODA Spend Management helps pool buying activity and helps you consolidate purchasing activity with the best suppliers. This begins by driving adoption across a wider corporate audience with the solution's intuitive requisitioning and purchase order user interface. This ease of use drives adoption and puts more spend under management. The full volume of corporate buying activity is then funneled to the best suppliers, offering the best prices and services. This process is further facilitated by providing electronic catalogs to end users, containing items from the best suppliers and at the best prices. Users can also "punch out" to preferred supplier web sites and return chosen goods into the approval process. The result of all these capabilities is fewer suppliers to manage; more spend under management and lower overall item prices.

Negotiate

Every company wants to negotiate lower prices with suppliers, but they aren't always in position to do so. Suppliers are more likely to provide negotiated prices or volume discounts when a buyer can illustrate a history of purchasing significant volumes. In manual or semi-automated environments, this information is nearly impossible to assemble and is exceptionally difficult to accomplish when buying is fragmented as described above.

The CODA Spend Management solution provides complete visibility to all buying activity, arming procurement managers with information for supplier negotiations. Purchasing managers can analyze buying activities by item, category, supplier, location, department, time of year and other user-defined criteria. With this valuable information in hand, procurement managers can negotiate volume discounts with preferred suppliers. These negotiated item prices are then placed in centralized catalogs where end users can enjoy negotiated prices and quantity discounts to help make their budgets stretch further.

Workflow, Process & Control Automation

A Framework for Controls

The Control Framework makes processes more visible, repeatable and auditable. The end results are lower audit fees, continual compliance and complete control.

As part of the CODA Link architecture, it simply "lays over" all your disparate processes, providing visibility of the control activities buried inside the business. Control Framework is particularly effective for period closes, where it can dramatically reduce the number of days and man-hours required to complete this major, recurring task.

Control Framework in Action

Here are just a few examples of how it can be used:

• period-end close
• year-end close
• supplier on-boarding and review processes
• customer addition and review processes
• account reconciliations
• bank reconciliation and cash management processes
• asset acquisition and approval processes
• operational system reconciliations
• request for payment processes
• internal audit and compliance
• personal expense management
• HR -- recruitment & new hire process
• IT backup and other maintenance routines

The Benefits of Taking Control

With the Control Framework, these processes can become more:

• Repeatable & refinable -- the starting point is your own best practice model for the process. All the steps are set out, so each one can be followed in the same order each time -- guaranteeing consistency. They can also be easily fine-tuned to further improve their efficiency and effectiveness -- without needing to learn specialized programming skills or constantly call upon in-house IT resources!
• Visible & coordinated -- the system takes your process project plan and automatically generates a shared, secure website to provide complete visibility of the whole process and continual coordination among participants. It enables each participant to see the relevant information for each procedure (depending on that individual's role and access rights). This includes details of the people involved, as well as the tasks, statuses and related documents held in the control framework's central repository. This keeps all participants aware of the input needed and when it is required -- keeping your process on track.
• Controlled & integrated -- each task can be assigned to owners, along with timescales and any dependency on other tasks, while keeping all participants informed of what input is needed and when. This includes: automated emails to prompt actions by participants, InfoPath® forms to gather the information from source systems for review, online authorizations, and automated initiation of particular tasks when preset conditions are met. It also enables control over the process while it's happening -- for example to reassign a stalled task.
• Auditable & secure -- every documented step in the process has an owner, and each change made is recorded with a tamper-proof audit trail to show what was done, when and by whom!
• Self documenting -- because each step of a process is now visible and auditable, control documentation is continuously available online, including: supporting materials, spreadsheets and other time-stamped information. Since the documentation is a natural byproduct of the process, the control framework can significantly reduce audit fees and audit preparation costs.
• Enterprise-wide -- the control framework extends continuous, ongoing risk management and compliance deep into your operations, all the way back to the process' point of origin. The framework can bridge the gaps between insular systems and inaccessible data spread across the organization.