Solution Brief: Aptitude Accounting Hub

Aptitude Accounting Hub

Achieve inancial control, transparency and insight
ACHIEVE FINANCIAL CONTROL

The Aptitude
Accounting Hub
empowers us to
progressively transform
inance while creating
a detailed inancial
data foundation
CFO, Multinational
Telecom Company

Control accounting rules and data at a single point; improve

Finances agility to accommodate new businesses, products
and models.

REPORT CONFIDENTLY
Deliver inance-quality information with cross-divisional alignment.
Gain transparency into the detail behind your General Ledger
balances by knowing your data lineage.

MAKE BETTER DECISIONS, FASTER

Create a reliable information channel to speed the inancial close.
Unlock insight with a inancial data source that is validated,
granular and interconnected.

Solution Brief: Aptitude Accounting Hub

Progressively Transform Finance

Finances role is more complex than ever. CFOs need to
eficiently report on how their irms are delivering
shareholder value while identifying opportunities for
future growth and proitability.
Finance is burdened with regulatory oversight they
must have knowledge of, and justiication for, the
business process transformations inherent in reported
results. They must prepare for the future whilst dealing
with the present and reporting the past.
Unfortunately, inance teams are held back by day to
day requirements, such as dealing with reconciliations,
clearing suspense, and preparing enhanced accounting
for management. Finance need to analyze and apply
new accounting policies, address regulatory reporting
requirements and integrate new businesses and
products. Existing Finance IT architectures fail to support
rapid and eficient change.

What is needed is a step change. Assured inancial

reporting that provides detail and transparency into the
as-was; engines that deliver near real-time insight into
the as-is; analytics and rich data that support analysis
into the to-be. Whatever the time horizon; all reporting
delivered from a truly integrated information hub.
The Aptitude Accounting Hub is an operational platform
for Finance. The Hub centralizes control, improves
reporting, and generates a rich source of data while
giving Finance more agility to handle future changes.
The product links operations systems and data from
across the enterprise, bringing together Finance, Risk
and Business Information services. It automates the
inancial accounting processes and provides a inancial
data foundation to support a wide variety of end-user
requirements. All of this while itting into your existing
Finance architecture removing the need for expensive
and complex IT implementation projects.

Aptitude Accounting Hub Addresses Key Finance Challenges

Finances Requirements

Aptitude Accounting Hub components

Link operations with Finance

Data Preparation Layer accesses, validates, enriches, and standardizes

transaction-level data from across heterogeneous source systems;
provides clear data lineage and managed worklow in high-demand
environments

Automate the inance

close process from source
to sign-off

Business user-managed accounting rules

Pre-populated Business Event Lifecycle and IFRS/GAAP accounting
templates to speed implementation
Rules-based processing to account for business and life cycle events
Automate adjustment processes

Build a inancial data

foundation to improve
strategic decision making

Integrated Sub-Ledger maintains summary balances that substantiate

the General Ledger, and detailed balances to support the operational
accounting requirements at business unit level
Multi-GAAP, multi-currency, multi-entity accounting
Full inance data model with extendable, conigurable data dimensions
linked to core accounting information

Address current and

emerging statutory,
regulatory and inancial
reporting requirements

Conigurable Accounting Engine gives Finance full control to create and

deploy effective- dated business rules
Generate multi-GAAP accounting from the single transaction event
Decoupled from the General Ledger & ERP environment to reduce the
cost and complexity of change
Scale to meet future transaction processing volumes

For more information, visit: www.aptitudesoftware.com

Solution Brief: Aptitude Accounting Hub

The Accounting Hub links disparate

inance and operations infrastructure
to empower Finance
SOURCE
SYSTEMS

APTITUDE ACCOUNTING HUB

Billing, Trading,
Policy and other
Transaction
Systems

INTEGRATE
DATA

STORE
DETAILED
BALANCES

CONTROL
ACCOUNTING

IMPROVE
REPORTING

Cash &
Settlements

Reference
Data

REPORTING
SYSTEMS

General
Ledger

Consolidation,
Business
Information
and Analytics

What challenges are addressed with the Accounting Hub?

One of the worlds largest banks generates multiGAAP reporting from millions of daily trade and
transaction events
A leading insurer is building a inancial data
foundation powering them to compete in a changing,
more competitive market

A multi-national telecommunications provider is

streamlining, simplifying and automating inance
operations... while addressing accounting policy
changes
A top consumer inancial services company avoided
a costly GL upgrade, automated burdensome
manual adjustment processes and is building a
data foundation for proitability analytics

Request a demonstration: [email protected]

Solution Brief: Aptitude Accounting Hub

Aptitude Accounting Hub Features

BUSINESS USER INTERFACE
Single
Sourcing Layer
1

Targets are
standardized tables
for all transactions
and reference data
Data transformation,
process coordination,
exception
management and
worklow

Reporting
Data
Repository

Product lifecycle templates delivered

out of the box

Data
validation,
enrichment,
standardization

Accounting Engine
Multi-GAAP/IFRS accounting templates
for quick implementation

Visible, auditable accounting logic,

adapted as quickly as your business changes

Financial Data Repository

Extensive inancial data model covering

inancial, transactional and reference data

Sub-Ledger

Conigure custom
reporting serving all
inancial, statutory,
regulatory and
management
requirements
Integrate outputs with
SAP, Oracle Financials
or other back-ofice
systems

Multi-entity, multi-currency, multi-GAAP,

multi-period
Summary and detailed balances: drill down
from balances to transaction-level detail
FX translation and revaluation
Manual adjustments capabilities

How data lows through the Aptitude Accounting Hub

1

Source system integration: transactional, business

event and balance data from source systems support for wide variety of ile formats e.g. XML,
lat ile, manual entries

Creation of debits/credits: accounting engine

derives debits/credits for all transactions,
combining with pass-through postings

Population of journals and balances: the SubLedger creates journal lines from accounting
events and updates balances

Cube Engine extracts and retains data to provide

pre-conigured reporting views

Standardization & validation: records transformed

to standard form and put through rules-driven
validation, correction and exception processes
Persistent data storage: inancial data repository
stores detailed inancial, transactional and
reference data

For more information, visit: www.aptitudesoftware.com

Solution Brief: Aptitude Accounting Hub

Apply
consistent
accounting
at scale, with
a three step
accounting
engine

IDENTIFY
BUSINESS
EVENTS OR
ACCOUNTING

IDENTIFY
ACCOUNTING
PATTERNS

IDENTIFY
ACCOUNT
MAPPING

ACCOUNTING
EVENTS OR
BUSINESS
IDENTIFY
BUSINESS
EVENTS

ACCOUNTING
EVENTS OR
BUSINESS
IDENTIFY
CONFIGURABLE
POSTING RULES

ACCOUNTING
EVENTS OR
BUSINESS
IDENTIFY
CONFIGURABLE
ACCOUNT LOOKUPS

Control accounting rule and accounting transformations at scale

Finance teams use the Aptitude Accounting Hub
to control accounting logic at a single point in their
inance architecture. Users apply the products system
of deining and processing standard business events
in order to apply accounting consistently, at a very
granular level even for large transaction volumes. The
products in-built accounting engine is used to:
1. Identify the lifecycle events present throughout
the life of every product

2. Establish common accounting events so that

they can be treated consistently
3. Deine and apply accounting and business
logic consistently for all products and related
lifecycle events
Business users deine and control all accounting rules,
posting patterns and account mappings. Many users
beneit from IFRS accounting templates that are
provided out of the box in order to accelerate
project implementations.

Why do leading irms choose the Aptitude Accounting Hub?

The Aptitude Accounting Hub provides a range of beneits over other accounting
integration products or approaches.
A true multi-GAAP and multi-entity accounting
sub-ledger to maintain summary and detailed
balances
IFRS accounting templates out-of-the-box to
speed implementations
Business user control with graphical rules
interfaces

Integrated Financial Data Repository to support

reporting and drill-down
Seamless integration with existing Finance IT
environments; works luidly across in-house /
3rd party / Oracle / SAP General Ledgers and
ERP modules
Best-in-class processing performance

Support for complex rules, including exception

management

Request a demonstration: [email protected]

Solution Brief: Aptitude Accounting Hub

A leading consumer inancial

services irm transforms Finance with
the Aptitude Accounting Hub
Project Goals
Create a single operational
environment for inance processing
and reporting
Speed to respond to changes such
as need for FX valuation capabilities
Reduce cost and risk of manual
processing
Empower inancial analytics and
the ability to drill down from GL to
underlying transactions

STEP 1

Large volumes of manual adjustments

were automated or routed through structured
worklows to greatly increase speed and
auditability of accounting.

STEP 2

Source data from 90+ source systems was

integrated using a single standardization
layer, ensuring integrity and traceability while
removing disparate manual integrations.

STEP 3

The existing GL was supplemented with

a Sub-Ledger, providing a drill down to
transactional data. Reconciliations ensured
data was granular, attributable and accurate.

STEP 4

Veriied inance data was linked with

operational data within an existing data
warehouse to give the business high quality,
on demand reporting across systems.

STEP 5

Proitability calculation engines were

implemented using both inance and
operational data to standardize analyses
and provide detailed, ongoing information.

A leading consumer credit and inancial services

company wanted to better understand what
transactions were driving proitability. They realized
that small changes to pricing, contracts or cash
management, when applied over their millions of
transactions, could increase proits and a
competitive edge.
Unfortunately, the CFO and inance team found
that the information in their data warehouse was
neither reliable or timely enough, and their legacy
General Ledger only showed highly aggregated
balances. To make matters more dificult, inance
processing was characterized by highly manual
(Excel-based) processes there was no single
source of data. Here are the steps they took to
supercharge their inancial reporting capabilities.

For more information, visit: www.aptitudesoftware.com

Solution Brief: Aptitude Accounting Hub

About Aptitude Software

Aptitude Software has served Chief Financial
Oficers at many of the worlds largest companies
for over 15 years.
We combine inance expertise and technology
assets to help our customers achieve inancial
control, transparency and insight.

Request a demonstration: [email protected]

For more information

call us on
+1 617 273 8289 (US)
+44 (0) 207 496 8100 (UK)
or email
[email protected]
Copyright Aptitude Software Limited
2014 - 2015. All Rights Reserved. APTITUDE,
APTITUDE ACCOUNTING HUB, APTITUDE
ALLOCATION ENGINE, APTITUDE REVENUE
RECOGNITION ENGINE and the Triangles
device are trademarks of Aptitude Software
Limited. MICROGEN is a trademark of
Microgen plc. Aptitude - U.S. and European
Patents Pending (for more information please
refer to: https://www.aptitudesoftware.com/
patentsandtrademarks)