Enterprise Financial Management

Enterprise Financial Management

Businesses face many challenges managing organizations that span multiple locations, languages, currencies and tax regimes. We at Abel have thought about these challenges and have delivered a robust solution that meets the financial management needs of small and mid-sized businesses worldwide. Abel’s Enterprise Financial Management functions work across multiple databases so you can either consolidate or view discrete financial and operational information from your trading branches, no matter where they are located geographically. External Financial Ledgers enable inter database financial processing, reporting and tax journals. Consolidated Export gives you enterprise wide financial summaries of your organization’s financial information across multiple Abel databases.

Enterprise Financial Ledgers

Abel’s Enterprise Financial Ledgers offers some unique features for businesses running multiple Abel databases. Each database can run independently while providing a consolidated financial view supported by periodic inter-database transfers. Each database location synchronizes its general ledger account balances with an equivalent account structure in a Corporate database or Regional database, giving you a consolidated view of the financial accounts across different countries and currencies.

Abel’s Enterprise Financial Ledger functionality suits businesses that share transactions and / or administration resources e.g. they are parts of the same company, they trade with each other, usually report to the same tax entity, move stock between each other or share their financial administration functions.

Users in a Corporate database or in Branch databases can easily see a combined view of each branches’ financial data comprising both local transactions and corporate database transactions for each branch. Abel’s security ensures that users can only see branch data that they are authorized to access.

Enterprise Financial Ledgers enable full processing of financial transactions within a parent database and also support both centralized and distributed management of accounting functions. Corporate office staff can create transactions for branch databases. Each database contains “External” Financial Ledger data structures that sit alongside the General Ledger. These data structures contain General Ledger data, Budget data and Tax data from other databases. Abel’s reports can combine both External Ledger data and General Ledger data to give you an Enterprise view of your Financial Ledgers.

You can schedule a process to populate the external financial ledgers at a set frequency – usually daily during off peak hours. You can also run the process on demand without affecting the scheduled processes e.g. after end of financial period close. Abel’s security lets you manage what data users have access to in other databases.

This diagram shows how Abel exchanges financial summary data between databases.

Consolidated Export for higher levels within your organization

Abel’s Consolidated Export is for businesses that need monthly consolidated financial information at higher levels within their organization e.g. regional and international corporate offices. The Consolidated Export process is run by request after end of financial period processing has been completed.

Larger organizations may run Abel’s External Financial Ledgers at the lower levels of their organization structure and also run the Consolidated Export to send summarized financial data higher up the group after the close of each financial period.

Data is exported and stored in its original currency in the destination database. Abel handles any currency differences when reports are run – producing reports in any currency according to your needs.

Managing Accounting Periods

With Abel, you can run different financial periods and year ends in different databases, or, you can synchronize them according to your business requirements. Alternatively, you can choose to propagate a Corporate Office’s Account Period Control settings to its Branch databases. This enables you to close the accounting periods of related branch databases at the same time as you close the accounting period in your Corporate Office database. This feature is especially useful for installations using External Financial Ledgers.

If you have different accounting periods and year ends in different databases, Abel’s reporting can handle this – see Financial Reports below.

Managing Differences in Charts of Accounts

In any multi-location operation, there are differences that need to be handled. Abel provides some features to help.

Managing Differences in Charts of Accounts

It’s better if the charts of accounts match throughout your organization but, if not, Abel provides General Ledger account code account mapping for use with External Financial Ledgers or Consolidated Export. This means parts of your organization that have different charts of accounts can still be consolidated. This is especially helpful for handling new acquisitions or country-specific differences in the charts of accounts.

Managing Differences in Your Organization Structure

Branches data can be merged to company level for External Financial Ledgers or Consolidated Export if required, for example if higher levels in your organization only need a Country total instead of branch totals. Branch codes can be mapped to different branch codes to suit the destination database if required.

Financial Reports

For installations using Abel’s Enterprise Financial Ledgers or Consolidated Export, Abel’s standard financial reports can report either local data, external data (that has been imported into the local database) or a combination of both giving you the ability to report and understand your data from an Enterprise perspective.

Abel’s “Reporting Branches” group companies and departments in different ways to suit different reporting purposes. You can define any number of reporting branches each containing the company / department groupings of trading branches that suit your business. This enables you to report your data in many different ways, giving you quality information to truly manage your organization. If you need to report in multiple currencies or across different accounting periods, specify a Reporting Branch for each currency and single period control and Abel will convert the currency and line up the financial years as requested when the reports are run.