A full ERP system designed by UNIT4 CODA for large enterprises.
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.
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
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.
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.
Technical Features
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Within the Browse functions of Coda Financials, ‘Selector’ tools give complete central control over:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are just a few examples of how it can be used:
With the Control Framework, these processes can become more:
Expensive, Poor customer service and delays. For small business the cost is unaffordable. Should one decide to move to another product you are penalised for the remainder of the contract you have with them. No concessions , no compromise despite the long relationship. Long delays on email and round about customer service. You cannot even get automated payments with the service without paying extra, this should be a basic.
Ease of use.
The customer service provided by the various account managers we had during the duration of our time with Unit4.
We recognized that to meet the demands invoice processing placed on the team, we’d need to add significantly to headcount. Rather than just increase headcount to cope, we wanted a better way of capturing and approving invoices. We also wanted to eliminate other types of paper handling and make cost savings and productivity gains.