Revolutionizing the record-to-report process

Michael Ross: Hello, great to be here. Trintech is a leading global provider of integrated record-to-report (R2R) software solutions that help companies drive improvement and transformation of their financial close by ensuring the accuracy of their financial reporting. We do this by focusing on the efficiency and effectiveness to reduce the risk of misstatement and error in the financial close process through leveraging our industry-leading Cadency platform.

I’m the Chief Product Officer at Trintech, responsible for understanding the needs of the market, where it’s heading within the next three to five years, and then creating and launching solutions that focus on improving financial recording through automation capabilities in the financial close space. As one of our largest partners, and one of the most significant users of Cadency, Capgemini helps to drive the strategic direction of our solutions. Capgemini was an early adoption Cadency partner and also one of our first partners to take a “lift and transform” approach for implementation, which drove value realization sooner for their clients. We are excited to see how this relationship grows over time, as we continue to build on it.

How does Cadency drive control, transparency, and governance across the R2R process within the finance function?

By leveraging your existing systems of record, such as your ERP/financial systems for account reconciliations and journal entries, treasury management systems for your cash information, tax systems for your tax transactions, and inventory management for your physical assets, Cadency enables you to maximize your ROI of those investments by keeping those systems as the vehicle to create a permanent record of all business activity as you run your financial controls, close, and reporting.

Cadency then integrates seamlessly into your systems of record to provide a System of Controls™ (SOC) that combines all your R2R activities, including reconciliation, variance analysis, close management, journal entry, compliance, intercompany, and reporting into a single, seamless platform. Because of its comprehensive design, the cost and risks associated with the financial close period decline dramatically while the office of finance’s efficiency and effectiveness significantly improves.

As all activities that deal with the global close and R2R functions are housed in Cadency, they are transparent to those within your organization. This enables you to understand whether your close is on track, identify any bottlenecks early in the process, see this data by priority/materiality, and fix any controls gaps when necessary. By leveraging Cadency, companies can achieve a System of Accounting Intelligence™ (SOAI) that improves their financial reporting accuracy, increases automation and lowers cost.

Uniquely tied to this is also in how a client interacts with Capgemini – whether a company drawing managed services from Capgemini or a transformation client. Our SOAI is what drives our ability to tie into the Capgemini framework in order to make a holistic offering for the client.

How does Cadency leverage intelligent automation to improve efficiency in the R2R process?

Trintech has invested heavily over the past several years in its intelligent automation capabilities within its Cadency solution including ERP Bots and Risk Intelligent RPA ™(RI RPA), in addition to recent advancements in Financial Controls AI^™.

Cadency’s ERP Bots extend automation activity, enabling you to automate that journal or close activity in your ERP, ensuring it is compliant with your controls, and driving efficiency adjacent to your close model. For example, let’s say you have a set of depreciation runs in SAP^® you need to perform for every legal entity. Of those, 300 require a test depreciation run, validation that all the different variants were successful, and then an actual depreciation run. Cadency enables you to complete this in a single step. Our ERP Bots ensure all 300 are run with all variants and validated, and then sends any that aren’t off for human inspection. Customers who have deployed this upgrade to their systems have reported saving close to 300 hours of human time per month.

In addition, Trintech operates under the firm belief that within the finance and accounting process, risk informs everything. Risk drives how much resources you can apply to an event or issue. This is why we have created Risk Intelligent RPA™ (RI RPA), enabling you to configure automated workflows based on your business’s risk tolerance so you can focus your team on the high value work that matters. As an example, one of our customers used RI RPA to flip their process on its head after realizing 93% of the balance sheet accounts, which only accounted for 6% of the balance sheet, was where they were spending most of their effort. By leveraging Trintech’s RI RPA, they were able to refocus from applying effort everywhere to focusing on the 7% of the balance sheet accounts that were making an impact.

Finally, we have recently started to invest more into our Financial Controls Artificial Intelligence™ (FC AI) capabilities, which uses machine learning algorithms to examine trends in your data over time, identify abnormalities, and automate workflows based on the associated risk.

All of these intelligent automation capabilities help move your organization from reporting to insights to achieve a System of Accounting Intelligence™ (SOAI).

What value does Trintech’s Cadency solution deliver to Capgemini’s clients?

Cadency helps your organization to increase the efficiency and effectiveness while lowering your risk and cost throughout your financial close process. In addition to this, as you are partnering with Capgemini, these technologies become incorporated into a transparent partnership. This integrates all of your activities into a single framework and enables you to monitor it from a single Cadency dashboard, giving you dependable control and visibility of your financial close process regardless of who is performing which parts.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are requiring their people to work from home. How can Cadency help here?

Cadency is fit for purpose for remote working for a number of reasons. First, as a cloud-based solution, it’s accessible from anywhere in the world. In fact, we have customers on every continent except Antarctica. So, the technology has always been available and secure in a global environment, thanks to leading cyber-security technology available through our Cadency solution.

In addition, because Cadency provides you with a global System of Controls, even if your workforce is spread out across the globe, you don’t lose automation effectiveness or risk containment visibility. Cadency boasts core capabilities that work whether your employees are in an office or working from home.

What does the future hold for Trintech?

We’re continuing to invest heavily into our Financial Controls AI™ and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to better identify risk and leverage that through the automation framework available. This improves effectiveness by increasing automation, and thus, identifying hidden risks and sending those identified off for human review.

We’re also bringing out a whole new set of APIs and ERP Connectors, enabling us to integrate deeper into our clients’ infrastructure, whether that’s an Oracle^® connector, an SAP^® connector, APIs for talking to tax systems, or providing visibility for data APIs. This means you can leverage Tableau or other reporting solutions you already use for visualization and reporting. In addition, you can continue to expand the scope and integration across as many parts of your office of finance ecosystem into your System of Accounting Intelligence framework as possible.

Learn more about Capgemini’s partnership with Trintech and how we leverage our Finance Powered by Intelligent Automation offer to help our clients reimagine their finance operations. 

Michael Ross has over a decade of executive product management experience working in all components of B2B Cloud Software solutions with specializations in portfolio product management, pre/post acquisition integration, IT strategy development and execution and global project management.