CODA Announces Fast Close System

Harrogate, United Kingdom, August 25, 2006 --(PR.com)-- CODA Group, the finance systems specialist, today announced the launch of CODA-Control Manager, a finance tool to make the period-end close process faster and more controlled for users of SAP® solutions.

SAP has more than 33,000 customers worldwide, each of which has to close its accounts regularly, usually every month. Whilst ERP solutions such as the mySAP™ ERP application manage the financial data, much of the period close process takes place outside of those systems. In the majority of organizations, this is still a highly manual process.

“CODA-Control helps finance departments to get control over the period close, automatically scheduling the tasks, making the whole process standardized and visible to the Financial Controller, and ensuring every step taken is recorded and can be audited later.” said Jeremy Roche CODA Group CEO.

The increasing importance of Period Close
Increasing emphasis on compliance and performance management is driving greater focus on controlling the period close, since it is a critical process that underpin's those activities.

Speed is key, world class organizations can close their books 2-3 days after month end, though most take far longer – but so now is control, reliability and audit ability of the process.

Developed by CODA with support from Microsoft, CODA-Control uses standard tools that users are instantly familiar with. Therefore, it will work well alongside the tools and technologies used by those that are already using SAP solutions.

Control is an excellent platform for controlling period close and other business processes. It controls each of the tasks in the close process, making them controlled, visible, repeatable and audit able. It can be used as part of process-improvement activities such as ‘fast close’ projects to ensure standardized, best practice processes are maintained across an organization. Additionally it may be used to drive incremental process improvement, since it highlights where process inefficiencies are occurring and makes them simple to change and control.

Use of Web services means CODA-Control Manager is relatively easy to interface with other business systems, so will work in a mixed systems environment. It can be implemented in a staged approach, taking no more than a few days to get started with a pilot and gives minimal disruption for the finance team.

About CODA

CODA creates, markets and implements a complete range of software systems designed specifically to meet the needs of Financial Directors and Finance Departments. These include financial management systems, analysis applications, and business process management and control software to implement compliance solutions. Its service oriented architecture also makes CODA software easy for clients and other vendors to integrate it with their business applications.

CODA was founded in 1979, has around 550 employees working from 13 global locations. CODA software is designed for multi-currency, multi-language, multi-country, multi-company and multi-site operations, and is used by around 2,600 medium and large organizations in over 100 countries in a variety of markets and within both public and commercial sectors.

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