Triple A Rated Accounting — Cloud Business Solutions for Financial Services
If you have bad misconceptions about doing business in the cloud it’s time to rethink your position and here’s why…
Analysing data is becoming more and more important to institutions who want to stay ahead. But not every accounting solution provides the necessary tools. It’s crucial for financial services organisations to easily analyse information, using multiple dimensions in real time to gain essential analysis insight of financial data.
Analyse
Online dashboards allow you to view your business at the touch of a button. Unique analysis codes and smart KPI indicators are designed to help analyse the performance of divisions, locations, sales advisors — in fact pretty much anything — tick by tick.
You can see which parts of your operation are the most profitable and focus your resources on driving more value. The built in workflow allows the use of approval cycles for documents to improve control on costs.
Interrogate
The ability to analyse information within your accounting system is crucial to drive informed business decisions. But to be able to perform detailed analysis, the information has to be there in the first place.
Whether online accounting or on-premise, most financial systems fail to allow the capture of information at the transaction level. And without that valuable data, there is no basis for analysis.
You may be able to run a P&L by department or cost centre but that’s just about where it ends with most software.
We recently worked with a financial services organisation which has 7 offices located across various regions. Their 50+ advisors in 5 departments sell a range of financial services from 3 product categories. The majority of their business is direct but an increasing amount comes from 3rd party referrals as part of a new partner strategy.
They want to be able to view sales based on the following metrics:
• Department
• Advisor
• Location
• Region
• Product line
• Product category • Direct sales
• Indirect sales
Aqilla’s unique and powerful custom attributes enabled them to add a variety of custom fields to documents and reference data. For example, each sales invoice can have fields to capture the division, location and advisor. Each of which can be selected from a simple drop down list or filtered search field, thus aiding user input and avoiding corruption of the data being captured. The fields can also be made mandatory to ensure all the data is captured.
This can be taken a stage further, by adding the same analysis to purchase invoices and mapping the attributes to the ledger in Aqilla. We are then able to create a P&L report by department or location and even by advisor.
Departmental Budgets
Using custom attributes at the transaction level opens up a wealth of possibilities. For example, we are now able to use the attributes when working with Aqilla to prepare budgets. We can have our budget broken out by division and have each division prepare their own budget in Excel and then have it uploaded to Aqilla via the Add-In.
In addition, 3rd party commission payments can be automatically calculated by period.
Using attributes to analyse reference data
The use of attributes allows the customer to have a system tailored to their specific requirements. A customer file can have additional fields to capture information such as renewal dates, region or direct/indirect sales markets. So you can apply analysis to your clients and run reports, say by client category.
Migrate To Improve
Aqilla’s bidirectional Excel add-in was essential in providing additional analysis to existing data when you migrating from their legacy system. The firm had been selling the same products for 3 years but only split them into categories 12 months ago. So how can they analyse those products for historic transactions for the last 3 years?
With Aqilla and the Excel Add-in, they could create a product category attribute and map the individual products to a category using a simple excel lookup formula. Then, when the data is imported, historic transactions could be analysed by product category.
Assure
The financial services sector has come under close scrutiny in recent years and is obviously highly regulated. Aqilla is designed to help with compliance and provide extremely granular levels of control, data-audit and time-stamping so you can quickly determine exactly who did what and when.
WHY AQILLA?
Aqilla is built on Oracle’s enterprise technology platform — one of the most scalable and secure enterprise databases in the industry. It offers big business features like multi-currency, multi-entity accounting and can easily be linked to your other systems to form the hub of your application ecosystem via our fully documented API.
Our straightforward to use accounting solution provides Sales Ledger, Purchase Ledger, General Ledger, Cash Matching, Billing, Purchase Ordering & Invoicing, Timesheet and Expense Processing, Project Costing and Budgeting functionality across an almost unlimited range of analysis.
Aqilla combines all the features and tools the modern Finance Professional needs to
efficiently monitor, control and report in order to deliver reliable financial and management information to the heart of the organisation.
Aqilla is hosted at an enterprise class data centre located in the United Kingdom. All the data resides in the UK and is covered by local legislation.
