With the global financial crisis still top of mind, regulators and stakeholders are demanding that corporations more accurately report performance, and do a better job of mitigating risk and ensuring compliance. To meet this need, Teradata (NYSE: TDC) and Microgen Plc (LSE: MCGN) today announced a joint data warehouse-centric accounting platform that allows companies to drill down from general ledger balances into detailed transaction-based ledger and linked transaction details.
The joint solution pairs the Microgen Accounting Hub with the Teradata analytic platform to help companies consolidate financial information, execute detailed accounting rules and provide a single point of control for financial and accounting data from across their enterprise. This improves transparency and enables better performance management, two board-level imperatives for all businesses. The robust, transparent financial reporting and analytics are especially suited for rapidly changing industries, such as media, financial services and retail.
"Stakeholders' transparency demands are driving organizations to reconcile and integrate detailed operational systems with the aggregated book of business that is reported to The Street. That has not been done before. The added benefit of this integrated information approach is that by eliminating existing fragmented data and manual processes, companies can view their operational information and answer questions such as 'which customers cost us money, which ones drive our business, etc.'," said Jeanne Capachin, research director, IDC Financial Insights.
"When chief financial officers increase transparency by reducing the number of data integration points, they provide greater reporting consistency as well as better operational flexibility," said Lovett. "Automating data production and report composition vastly reduces manual errors. With our warehouse-centric accounting hub solution, companies can stop spending huge amounts of time, money and effort on data reconciliation and focus on business analysis."
Traditional financial systems are not designed to provide the analytic capabilities or detailed insights needed to adjust to both current and future regulatory and management reporting regimes. In most companies, data travels between multiple data marts, and general ledger systems do not retain transactional detail or accounting logic. These short-comings raise the risk of uncertainty over data accuracy and quality, and prevent reliable reconciliation of information back to the aggregated general ledger balances that inform the representations made to stockholders.
"When CFOs reduce the number of data integration points, they increase accuracy across transactional source systems and ERP systems providing greater reporting consistency as well as better operational flexibility. This can be applied across many industries: financial services, healthcare, media and utilities, to name a few," said Crawford.