Impressions of QAD's Enterprise Financials

Posted on: August 19, 2008 | By: SuperUser Account | Uncategorized

I attended QAD’s Enterprise Financials Training in July 2008. The two week training event focused on General Ledger, Budgeting, and Transaction Processing including AP and AR and the enhanced interface including Excel Integration. As a a financial manager, Certified Public Accountant, a power user, and a business management consultant over the last 15 years, my impression of QAD’s MFG/PRO financials would be described as adequate.
The software adequately supported multiple sites within national jurisdictions; it adequately accounted for transactions from sub modules and adequately allowed transaction processing across multiple sites and multiple entities. As an enterprise financial reporting system, MFG/PRO struggles to produce dynamic management reporting and dynamic external reporting.
Enterprise Financials solves many of the above issues with the previous version. Let me explain:

Dual Currency Reporting

The Enterprise Financial general ledger allows your company to report seamlessly in a domain currency or management currency. Each transaction is recorded in transaction currency, domain currency and management currency. Since the currency transactions are organic to the general ledger data, your company now gains the ability to report in different currency. For instance, you company’s functional currency is United States Dollars (USD). You have operations in Canada where there are statutory financial reporting requirements for Canada in Canadian Dollars (CAD). In this example, your domain currency is USD, your management currency is CAD and your transaction currencies can be any defined transaction currency for your business requirements.

Multiple General Ledger Layers

This is likely the most significant enhancement to the General Ledger functionality that Enterprise Financials delivers. Consider a general ledger layer as a sub set of the overall general ledger for the domain. A layer provides the ability to separate transactions associated with a specific general ledger account. The minimum number of layers includes an official layer, a management layer and a transient layer. The official layer is used for GAAP reporting in your appropriate national jurisdiction.
A management layer can satisfy a number of incremental reporting requirements including reporting results in alternate jurisdictions requiring different GAAP standards. It also can be used separate general ledger allocation models that you may use to associate Selling, General and Administrative costs to product lines. This separation allows for clean views of accounting transaction in the official layer and a more efficient ability to reconcile those accounts.
The transient layers can be used as temporary layers for managing resources and reviewing input into either the official or management layer. Managers can use the transient layer to review accountants’ journal entries before committing these entries to the official layer. If these entries are deemed inaccurate, they can simply be deleted. The transient layer can still be included in the financial statement reports, so this layer allows the financial managers to review the affect of the entry on statements before committing it to the official or management layer.

Enhanced Consolidation Accounting

The single most significant upgrade to financial consolidation functionality of other financial entities is the use of ending trial balance data. In MFG/PRO, the consolidation tool exported transactions from one domain to the consolidation domain. Because of this your company runs the risk of excluding transaction from consolidation booked after an export. With the Enterprise Financials Consolidation approach, the ending balance of the account is used for consolidation. This eliminates the risk month over month that results are excluded from the consolidation data. This is the fundamental approach a tool like Hyperion uses for consolidating multiple entities for financial reporting.

Conclusion

With the above referenced functionality, clearly QAD is moving in the direction of providing a multi-national, enterprise level general ledger that will enable reporting across the enterprise. QAD’s Enterprise Financials becomes a solid solution if your company has this profile.

If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me via email at avitullo@logan-consulting.com.



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