"The financials of ERP is a topic that can make any CFO (or CEO and CIO) very excitable” according to Thomas Wailgum CIO magazine.

And frankly, as it should! With every increasing pressure on companies to ensure they are streamlined in their business processes and delivering value to their shareholders, the thought of duplicating effort in any part of the business, is nigh abhorrent. But nowhere more so, if you are the CFO, where efficiency is the key to delivering results.

The recent launch of CashTracker has borne out the statement that standard ERP applications have been designed to process accounting and financial best practices (among other business processes) and not necessarily as an internal control tool. Whilst we are excited about CashTracker’s ability to meet Enterprise Financial compliance challenges, like duplicate payments, we are finding that more and more of our clients are utilising this piece of software as an audit tool to uncover poor business process and as an enabler for continuous process improvement

ERP systems are optimised to operate as transactional processing engines with basic compliance checking rules delivered as standard. This is where things may come unstuck.

The basic rules of most ERP systems do not have sufficient rigour to enable complete confidence in the accuracy of financial systems. Any errors in the ERP system can result in negative cash flow impacts – every CFO’s worst nightmare!

And this is where CashTracker is invaluable to Plaut’s clients. CashTracker is tightly integrated with SAP and monitors finance processes, uncovers non–standard business processes and ensures ALL invoices are analyzed and any duplicates in the system are flagged, before they are processed, saving time, money and the complexities of reversing transactions. Ah – the CFO can rest a little easier at night.