Financial Management

Regulatory compliance is a cornerstone of Priority's financial management module. Priority Financials also includes advanced billing, fixed assets, and cash management capabilities.

Regulatory Compliance

Regulatory standards require organizations to implement an internal control framework for maintaining auditable business transactions, financial transparency and real-time reporting, along with operational controls, including the ability to audit changes to software within the organization. Compliance with these standards can require a lot of effort and resources from businesses.

Fortunately, the ability to address compliance requirements at the earliest practicable stage can dramatically mitigate the costs to your company. The ramifications for implementing compliance regulations on the chosen ERP system are twofold:

• The company's financial reports are dependent on the management system and, to that end, the company's information security, logic, management of communications with subcontractors, supplies/software purchases, SLA and more are all monitored and tested.

• The business practices and controls of the management system are monitored regularly. The more these controls are computerized and on-line, the easier it becomes to manage and oversee them, and to perform compliance sampling.

Priority's Compliance Capabilities

Many of our customers use Priority for regulatory compliance enforcement, auditing and reporting.

Priority's compliance capabilities are based on the quantitative characteristics of any solid financial statement clarity, relevance, reliability and comparability making it a key tool for companies aspiring to financial regulatory compliance and control.

We continually monitor and keep up with changing compliance standards set by regulatory bodies, such as:

• The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (commonly called SOX)

• The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and its International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)

• The US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and its Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)

Priority includes the following key SOX compliance functions, among others:

• Internal controls: documentation, testing and sign-off controls

• History of statuses and changes to documents and reports

• Workflow procedures that facilitate testing and sign-off

• Verifiable audit trails

• Implementation and enforcement of authorization processes

• Automated processes for setting up and enforcing business rules, including clear and understandable graphic representations

• Real-time executive and consolidated reporting with drill-down capabilities

In compliance with IFRS and GAAP standards, Priority supports numerous regulatory features such as:

• Comprehensive financial statements, including balance sheets, income statements, statements of recognized income and/or expenses, and cash flow statements

• Comparative information for previous reporting periods

• Consolidated financial statements

• Measurement and valuation (including depreciation) of property, plant and equipment

• Inventory (stock) costing

• Managing receivables (debtors) and payables (creditors)

• Borrowing

• Revenue recognition

  Recognition of employee costs

• Income taxes

• Cash flow statements

• Leasing

• Amortized costs

Billing

Priority supports a variety of billing methods and functions, including project-based billing, recurring revenues (services, rentals, etc.), pre-defined payment terms, delivery-based billing and more, all of which are tightly linked to our revenue recognition methods.
These preconfigured, field-proven capabilities make invoicing and cash flow management a matter of automated control, rather than a labor intensive, time consuming and error-prone manual process.

Key Features:

• Customer billing based on project-related time and expense reports

• Customer billing of billable support calls

• Customer billing of reimbursable support time

• Billing-based commission and incentive calculations and payment processing

• Online bill payment, allowing customers to select from predefined payment methods and billing plans.

• Online (web-based) and IVR PCI compliant credit card processing

• Credit card reconciliation with full audit trail from order placement through the deposit of paid amounts

• Automatic invoice generation with reference to one-time/recurring payments and their terms (quarterly, monthly…), including special discounts/finance charges based on applicable payment terms, sales tax, arrears, proration, and more

  Receipts that reference invoices directly inherit applicable terms for accepting payment or issuing credit

Fixed Assets

Priority's fixed asset capabilities are seamlessly integrated with its purchase management module and the General Ledger (GL), providing complete lifecycle tracking and depreciation of assets, from purchase to retirement.

Key Features:

• Unlimited depreciation methods (using depreciation tables)

• Single asset - multiple depreciation methods, for both financial and reporting purposes

• Complete fixed asset lifecycle management, from purchase to retirement:User level report generation capabilities for analysis across asset families, subsidiaries, locations and many other asset attributes

  • Direct posting of purchased items to the assets repository
  • Automatic generation of multiple asset records and their respective depreciation schedules, all related to the purchase of a single item
  • Direct posting of residual (revaluation/disposal) "end of life" asset value

• User level report generation capabilities for analysis across asset families, subsidiaries, locations and many other asset attributes

Cash Management

Priority's cash management solution provides for complete, detailed monitoring of Order-to-Cash and Purchase-to-Pay processes, with built-in BPM enabling close tracking of Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), aging and cash-flow projections.

Key Features:

• Monitoring tools to keep track of DSO, aging and their trends

• A tool that generates provisional entries, creating a credible cash flow forecast with temporary journal entries for each open sales/purchase order, unpaid Goods Receiving Voucher (GRV), unbilled transactions, prepayments, taxes, while excluding any documents that have been flagged for omission from cash flow

  Multi-company simulation tools to facilitate building forecasts with externally dictated account balances

• Currency Exposure reporting

Cost Control

Manage and control costs using multi-dimensional profit and cost centers.

Key Features:

• Each transaction may be simultaneously burdened on up to 5 different "orthogonal" profit centers (direct costs)

• Indirect costs may be allocated to cost centers for further burden allocation

• Multiple cost allocation distribution options (and cost allocation parameters)

• Tree-like hierarchies of profit/cost centers

• Monitoring tools to keep track of DSO, aging and their trends

Budget Control

Budget versions, budget periods, budget trees, and BPM are tightly integrated into the organization's business activities from the purchase requisition through delivery, including interdepartmental service charges and inventory transactions.

Key Features:

• Complete roll-over and tracking of budget allocation, from the purchase requisition through the warehouse receipt and up to the final payment (and similar tracking of customer orders, from price quote to deposit slip)

• BPM-controlled budget versions, allocations, effective dates and authorization

• Real-time reporting and tracking tools with built-in alerts when actual spending deviates from budgeted spending by more than the designated threshold

• Multiple budget items may be assigned to a single GL account

• Budget tree integrity is checked and a preset hierarchy is enforced

Financial Statement Generator

This generator is used to customize financial statements (e.g., balance sheets, profit and loss reports, trial balances, and supporting schedules). The variety of reports that can be created is virtually limitless, including, for instance:

• Balance sheet – 1st Quarter (current year)

• Balance sheet – 2nd Quarter (current versus previous year)

• Opening account balances for October

• Total transactions for October

• Closing account balances for October

• Profitability of Company A versus Company B

• Profitability of various departments