Monthly Archives: October 2011

Coda Financials V12 – Destination: Control Delivers Superior Management and Flexibility to CFOs

Posted: October 17, 2011 By: UNIT4 Business Software

When it comes to a company’s financial operations, CFOs have little interest in compromise. They see a direct connection between a healthy corporate bottom line and their ability to control all aspects of their organization and effectively manage the risks and costs of today’s dynamic environment. Finance managers need visibility of financial controls that span many systems, people and departments.

With this in mind, we have just released Coda Financials V12 – Destination: Control, the 12th generation of our best-of-class financial management software. At its core, this latest release gives CFOs three new elements of financial control – 10 new Power Controls, 10 new Precision Controls and enhanced ability to automate financial controls across processes, applications, and people. These provide financial executives the ability to transform the unpredictable and unknown into accurate, precise, timely information and financial modeling.

By coupling Coda Financials – Destination: Control’s tremendous productivity improvements (testing measures a 25 percent improvement in efficiency) with the reliability and flexibility that comes from the software, we free CFOs from the rigidity of their financial management system. This ability to efficiently adapt a company’s financial architecture regularly earns UNIT4 Business Software praise from customers eager not only to keep up with change, but also get out in front and gain a competitive advantage.

UNIT4 Business Software is excited about these enhancements. We are committed to helping businesses embrace change independently, in the most simple, quick and cost-effective way. Be sure to check out the full details with Destination: Control Overview. What is your experience with the cost of change? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Data Integration on YOUR Terms – A Second Example

Posted: October 6, 2011 By: UNIT4 Business Software

Today we’ll give you another example of how you can have data transparency on your own terms.

If you don’t believe you need data transparency and real-time access to financial information, you might want to rethink your position. Consider this familiar scenario, demonstrating the importance of easy and instant access to data:

An organization has a decentralized customer service function, using representatives charged with entering sales orders into the operation system. These CSRs need access at their fingertips to the key components of the sales process. The list could include inventory, a host of information about the customer (outstanding balance, credit limit, last order information, and D&B rating), plus shipping and logistics options – information that must come from several enterprise applications. The order-taking process needs to:

Ensure there is a sufficient number of widgets in inventory to fulfill the order;
Check the customer’s credit line to be sure it can make the order;
Take the widgets out of inventory so another customer doesn’t buy the same widgets;
Update the customer’s credit limit;
Trigger shipping of the widgets from the most appropriate location; and
Update the organization’s many sales and revenue reports.

Of course, to be most valuable, the information must be available in real time.

How to achieve this?

One approach is to give the CSRs access to the many applications in play. The downside includes expense (licensing, training, and the cost of change), greater likelihood of human error, and a prolonged customer experience.

The whole workflow becomes possible through open APIs that leverage web services. Quickly connected, Coda Financials can provide all of that information in real-time directly through the CSR order-entry screen. All the necessary information is instantly available and in a format already familiar to the CSR.

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Open APIs – Data Integration Solution on YOUR Terms

Posted: October 5, 2011 By: UNIT4 Business Software

For most IT and finance personnel, data transparency is more theory than practice (particularly when it comes to financial software). The challenge has been how to achieve interoperability among the dozens, if not hundreds, of systems deployed across an organization.

It’s like a Tower of Babel in many organizations because different systems – HR, customer service, logistics, finance, etc. – are not able to talk transparently and in real time.

There are many reasons. Departments may have purchased software without consulting finance and IT, or interoperability may not have been a key purchase criterion. Without transparent interoperability, organizations must resort to running proprietary rules and batch files to move data between applications. This unsustainable and expensive approach is cumbersome (expensive to build and modify), particularly in the wake of the inevitable changes to workflow and business logic. Further, organizations are at the mercy of software vendors to build the necessary translation data integration tools.

Data Integration Solution

The game changer is SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and XML combined with open APIs (application programming interfaces), which has enabled an unmatched environment of interoperability.

It is this interoperability that is at the core of the architecture of UNIT4 Business Software’s financial management software. Simply put, 100 percent of Coda Financials is API-enabled, meaning that anything that can be done with a keyboard in Coda can be done externally. From its inception, Coda Financials has supported these industry-standard APIs right out of the box – at no additional cost.

Coda Financials has hundreds of functions that allow data to travel in and out of Coda transparently and in real time. Most other financial management products on the market have 8-12.

Business Integration Example

A company uses an external billing system, which is the golden source for customer data additions, updates, and deletions. That information, however, must make its way into the company’s master financial management system, which contains the data that is accessed for countless other reports. Rather than maintaining the information (manually) in both systems, Coda Financials and its open API structure allows the company to synchronize all invoices directly and automatically into Coda. The software monitors the billing system for record changes and pulls that information into Coda.

This approach eliminates billing system reports that don’t match accounting reports, sales reports that are missing the latest customers and their data as well as the time-consuming process of de-duping that customer list.

Coda Financials’ architecture gives customers the power to control when and how they integrate their applications. We give you integration your way.

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