The pursuit of first time correct data entries
Data Quality issues seem to be pervasive — ERP customers want to have data in their systems of the best possible quality but it is really difficult to achieve this without either more people or controls to run the process.
I have observed that application data management (ADM) is best achieved if it is tackled by the business in a systematic way and this often means more documented procedures or technology.
Most accounting professionals and auditors at least, would agree that technology is a better approach than just policies and procedures.
Lowering audit costs
Technology at least assures consistency and adherence, depending on how it is implemented.
This can reduce the overall cost of improving controls because it can be consistently tested and the process assured. This in turn can lower audit costs because the process is consistent and routine.
For the manual journal entry (MJE) process in SAP in particular, there would be an expectation that the quality, appropriateness and consistency of MJE requests and entries are of the highest possible quality — after-all your financial system is the system you use to report the status of your business.
It is reasonable to expect that in the absence of a robust managed process the cost of maintaining and auditing the MJE can be high. In addition there is the risk of bad data and that is something that is difficult to eliminate or reduce without the application of some technology solution.
For many organizations the MJE process seems to be cumbersome, fraught with risk and yet unavoidable.
Adjusting accounting journals’ purpose is to align the book of record to correctly reflect the circumstances of the business but when processes are not fully automated, perhaps missing integration or when the results of business activities are ambiguous or can be influenced by manual manipulation (deliberate or unintentional) corrections need to be made — the manual journal is often the accounting tool that is used to address this.
The impact of automation on ERP and IT
In my conversations with numerous controllers and accountants, they’ve suggested that this manual process cannot in fact be eliminated. Their existing integration scenarios that are fully automated simply don’t address the unanticipated
What they feel can be done however, is that the volume of journals can be reduced.
Precision for example, can sometimes be weighed against the concept of accounting materiality.
While no one wants imprecise accounting, minor rounding errors and variances should be corrected only when they materially impact the efficiency of the accounting function or change the status of the reporting.
All too often, we’re told, that the unforgiving nature of the ‘system’ requires that everything balance to the penny and that every allocation should be correct and proper. Unfortunately many of the methods applied to loading data into SAP like journals, aren’t interactive, don’t provide good feedback and don’t even work with Microsoft Excel data directly.
The lack of agile IT
Business often engages frequently with IT to try to triage load and post failures or to try to get changes incorporated into the data loading solution to accommodate evolving business needs but when IT has a backlog of other more important projects or infrastructure changes — these requests get put into a backlog and never get addressed.
Business users are telling us that the nature of the solutions that IT have deployed, combined with the complexity of the SAP infrastructure and protracted timelines required for incorporating changes mean that often the business has to deal with a lot of manual workarounds until IT is able to close the gap in terms of meeting business requirements.
IT also doesn’t seem to always understand the importance that Finance users store in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. They’re often dismissed because of their flexibility and ubiquity. IT thinks accountants are being careless or lazy when they resort to using spreadsheets to store or distribute information.
The typical finance user lives and breathes spreadsheets for all kinds of activities including in staging data for manual journal processing. Excel is almost part of their DNA and most finance users would not be able to get through a workday without using some sort of electronic spreadsheet application.
How new thinking and RAD software can help
Part of the driver for all this Excel activity and the manual journaling in particular, is a narrow view of the business function by individuals.
This is part of the culture of the diligent accountant or bookkeeper.
More often than not, it is because the system allows precision to become the dominant theme and the participants feel they are not empowered to direct their energies differently.
In order to meet the growing strategic demands of the business, the everyday accountants, bookkeepers and finance officers need to elevate their game, reduce their manual efforts and apply themselves to higher value and more considered work practices.
Winshuttle has a Rapid Application Development (RAD) platform that is popular for assisting in process improvement and application data management initiatives — over 2,000 SAP customers have elected to automate the manual journal entry process and help to free up time for finance users to engage in higher value activities like analytics and reporting.
The only way to do this is for IT to support the finance user in being able to prepare the data in the environment that they are comfortable with and then allow them to feed that data into a streamline data input mechanism.
These customers use the platform in several ways to improve data management processes. The first way, is to refuse to accept, and consequently minimize trivial requests. The second is to add governance and auditable sign offs to data requests.
This is achieved using a template-based low code approach to data management tasks like manual journal entry processing and using workflows to manage the routing, approval, rejection and auto posting of manual journal entries in systems like SAP.
We’ve seen Winshuttle deployed by customers who are using HANA as a database and across many different modules of SAP for different scenarios and in every industry segment.
The market speaks
For one customer in particular, implementing the Winshuttle platform led to their being able to elevate their “first time correct” KPI for MJE’s from 88% with their legacy solution to 99%.
This particular customer was able to retain their legacy Excel templates but implement a layer of governance and workflow approvals with integration to their SAP financials without having to make changes to their underlying SAP technology.
For another customer, they use forms with workflow to manage their finance master records process, so they use the Winshuttle platform to manage requests for changes to elements like customer and vendor records, cost and profit centres, GL accounts and budget values and even employee records.
Learning more
Winshuttle have provided a wealth of collateral online to explain the use cases and describe customer success stories including interviews, white papers, demonstration videos and even an ROI calculator. If you yourself are a Winshuttle user or leveraged their software to improve application data management I would love to hear your story. Additionally, if you’re interested in hearing actual customer testimonials and receive classroom style learning about the various products in the platform why not attend the annual Winshuttle User Group conference or attend a Hero User Group event near you!
