Finance

Standardisation and simplification are guiding principles which Four adopts wholeheartedly.Many organisations employ us to help rationalise and streamline their operations via Business Process Improvement or workflow solutions. We have seen this benefit a wide range of business and non-profit organisations, ensuring they can interpret their information without fear of repercussions from data that is inconsistent, duplicated, mis-matched or just horribly untidy. The following sections detail some of the work we do with a customer's finance and operational teams when deploying BPI and workflow solutions.

Corporate Governance

Whether you are trying to digitise a new chart of account form, a VPN connection through your firewall or changing a user's IT permissions, tracking and properly authorising a change in rights, permissions, corporate data or employee access is crucial for any well-run business. Four helps you transform cumbersome, paper-based processes into electronic ones with fully integrated electronic authorisation, so once a form is authorised the process becomes a button click rather than a data entry task. This not only helps streamline business processes, it instills standards across your business, something, which in turn provides consistency across your group of companies, operations and departments.

Cash Management

Are you able to develop timely and accurate forecasts of your global cash balances? Do you have control of your accounts receivable (AR) and solutions for managing billing disputes that can help you significantly reduce days sales outstanding (DSO)? Four Business Solutions can help you increase control over cash and investments, help maximise your use of cash reserves and ensure development and capital intensive projects are properly funded and the cash outlays properly planned.

Revenue Recognition & Revenue Assurance

Whether you are a telco with the challenges of revenue assurance or a business with deferred revenue, your policies need constant revue and the accounting calculations carefully monitored, as they can become complex and cumbersome very easily. Even the most straightforward of businesses needs proper accruals produced quickly and efficiently; far too often the systems are outdated, cumbersome and spreadsheet based. Four can help your business transform these processes into meaningful data which you can interrogate and reconcile quickly without fear of compromising your financial accuracy.

SOX Compliance

SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) compliance has caused huge debates as to its effectiveness and cost - but many US companies and those on the NYSE must adhere to its regulations. So stop seeing SOX as something inhibiting your business and instead start using smart BPI and workflow solutions that can help you improve your business. Four sees many organisations invest heavily in documenting every change to every business system, a good idea in principle but something that in the real world invariably makes a business slow to react and cumbersome to embrace change. By embracing SOX in the right way - so that the process becomes easier and more streamlined your business will start to benefit from SOX and you will see improvements in profitability, market share and customer loyalty.

Four will happily discuss how to help you adapt Business Process Improvement for your SOX requirements in 'bite size chunks' so that you can genuinely benefit rather than find it a corporate millstone. Having deployed SOX in your various operations, we can then help you consolidate your audit function utilising our dashboard to look for anomalies, drilling into the data to ensure your business is compliant and able to spot anomalies very quickly.

Financial Planning & Budgeting

The budgeting process in many organisations is either a poison chalice or something that consistently takes too long, is badly processed and gives poor results. The reason is often the mismatch of accounting and operations and the overuse of spreadsheets that get more complex and less comprehensible with each new version and every revised budget. By contrast, Four helps your business focus on the operational goals and transform this into smart budgeting, where the user does not need to understand the impact of purchasing an asset which requires depreciation, funding and maintenance. Managers can focus on revenue streams and marketing campaigns without the complications of debtors, tax and deferred revenue. Four can help you streamline the whole process and make the results easily understood by everyone within the organisation.

Employee Expenses & Per Diems

Most organisations process hundreds or thousands of employee expenses, sometimes known as per diems. With an integrated expenses management solution from Four you remove the potential for guesswork and human error - ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the data for internal reporting and taxation compliance. You also eliminate staff claiming outside the corporate boundaries, thus reducing much of the conflict and management time wasted addressing simple issues like the daily allowance for an evening meal whilst travelling or the rate for overnight accommodation at a hotel. Among the benefits: tax reporting is simplified and the receipt handling becomes straight forward, for instance.

Integration

Are your operational and finance staff re-keying data into different systems or reconciling the differences between them? Are they adding value or simply 'adding up'? Four can help you manage your corporate data, providing consistency and standards across the organisation so that the data becomes reliable, trusted and easily managed. We do this through Business Process Improvement and workflow smart enough to collect and authorise data but also feed it into your key corporate databases electronically. Four has a highly successful and talented development team that can help with a small interface into your data or develop comprehensive systems with fail-safe mechanisms and routine administration all handled digitally so that you can pump tens of thousands of transactions through every hour with complete confidence.

Consolidation, Reporting & Inquiries

Want to highlight trends, patterns and exceptions in your operational and financial data? Four Business Solutions offers a range of reporting and inquiry tools that can help you achieve the reporting required, cost effectively - without expensive IT overhead. Four’s consolidation tools have been designed to work in the most exacting environments, and our Business Process Improvement and workflow solutions are always designed with simplicity as the guiding principle.

Digital Signatures

Digital signatures replace your written signatures on any document you might normally sign. The process is favoured in many organisations where workflow, BPI and digitising document approaches have been adopted. Four can help you select the right tool for your business and ensure that you apply digital signatures at the right time and as effectively as possible. Simply stamping everything every day does little to improve systems, whereas well-deployed systems help senior managers and directors to use their time more effectively and streamline your business processes further.

Learn more about how Four Business Solutions’ finance solutions can help

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