Consolidation and Cash Management

Overview

Bringing together all the strands of your financial position, from multiple business entities across a group, and managing your cash flow can be quite a challenge!

This is especially true where ongoing changes – such as growth, restructuring or acquisitions – have created complex organizational structures or left a variety of separate (and often incompatible) accounting systems in their wake.

World-class group accounting and financial control

Our best-of-class consolidation and cash management tools have been designed specifically to help multi-company and international organizations gain the transparency they need, by delivering group accounting, statutory reporting, intercompany netting and cash planning more quickly, simply and consistently. They also improve agility, thanks to flexible integration capabilities and straightforward setup tools to easily cope with a variety of consolidation inputs from any number of ERP, finance and other business systems. The resulting flexibility enables you to quickly accommodate new organizational structures, additional source systems, compliance regimes, GAAP or IFRS reporting requirements.

Consolidation

If you are still struggling to get the results you need out of manual or spreadsheet-based systems – or even outdated consolidation applications – we can help you.

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Fast, clear, user-friendly consolidation processing

The Consolidation module of CODA Financials handles the process of reconciling and combining the accounts from across a group of companies – along with their various ERP, finance and other business systems – into a single “consolidated” group for statutory and management reporting. It delivers a whole range of options for operational financial control and statutory group accounting, including facilities for: swift automated consolidation processing, allocation handling and cash-flow statement/analysis – together with powerful but straightforward multi-dimensional reporting and analysis tools. This enables different users to gain the individual perspective on the figures they need.

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Auto-consolidation

Our powerful auto-consolidation tool can eliminate hours of manual consolidation work at the click of a button. It gathers together the data from all the companies or divisions at once. The user can then rapidly work through each level of the group and make the few remaining manual checks and adjustments required in each one.

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Step-by-step consolidation flow

The auto-consolidation engine is complemented by an intuitive, step-by-step approach to group consolidation that takes the user through each relevant process for each level of the company structure.

The user then simply clicks on each icon in turn and completes each process, working systematically up to the top level of consolidated accounts. In particular, issues such as allocation (see below), currency handling, acquisitions and accounting for intangibles are clearly defined during the consolidation process and easily viewed at each level of the company where they apply.

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Allocation

Our Consolidation module enables central costs or overheads to be easily allocated, whether it be to individual subsidiaries, to divisions within them, or between other dimensions (for example: business units, products or market segments) that users can set up within the system. Allocation schemes can be defined using a simple, wizard-driven four-step procedure. Straightforward maintenance tools allow users to edit or delete existing allocation schemes. In addition, the system enables easy setup of auto-balancing accounts, which ensures the balance sheet remains correct after an allocation is made.

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Scheduling

The scheduling tools enable various tasks to be planned and executed without further user input to set them in motion. In addition, you can schedule the locking or unlocking of versions or periods to control the access for individual users and to allow or prevent them from making further changes to the data.

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Intercompany Netting and Cash Planning tools

CODA Financials also enables you to seamlessly integrate key cash management functions with the rest of your consolidation and general finance processes, helping you maximize the value of the treasury function, by reducing costs and improving transparency.

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Netting

Netting can be used as a standalone solution, with other financial management and consolidation applications or as an integrated part of the CODA Financials suite. Different netting methods can be applied on preliminary and final netting, depending on statutory regulations and group policy. Netted payments can be transferred back for matching to A/R and A/P, creating a net payment file that is sent to the payment system. The result is a significant reduction in the number of payments/transactions, which can practically eliminate internal and external transaction costs. Currency netting also minimizes currency volumes and the number of foreign exchange payments, which in turn reduces all foreign-exchange-related costs.

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Cash Planning

We can also help you make the cash planning process more efficient, transparent, reliable and consistent. This is true, regardless of whether the process is an automated one (with input from bank systems, ERP systems and other corporate data sources) or if it is based on decentralized forecasting input from subsidiaries. In addition, it makes cash planning easier and frees up more time for value-adding analysis by automating the data flows, making the input and control more efficient and providing an automatic consolidation to all levels in the group’s organizational and operational structures. Its “Alert” feature makes the cash planning module even more proactive, by signaling when a change in cash flow exceeds a predefined level (either a percentage and/or an amount in currency).

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Consolidation and Cash Management – at a glance

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