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IFS Financials works worldwide, regardless of whether you choose to let the different countries use a centralized system or discrete systems in the respective region/country. The solution covers the entire needs of a company, including functionality for accounting rules that is seamlessly integrated with other business applications in use.
Accounting is a crucial part of a financials solution—internally to manage the enterprise and externally to satisfy legal requirements—but the handling of invoices, payments, fixed assets, etc. is equally important. It’s also true that accounting is basically the same in all countries, but the freedom to define a chart of accounts varies between countries, as do the reporting obligations imposed by the authorities. IFS Financials enables accounting rules and reporting to be freely defined in the respective companies while ensuring that consolidation and other reporting can be translated automatically to a central code plan and currency. Our financials solution for the entire corporation, locally and globally
Means of paying and being paid differ throughout the world and are affected principally by the banking system and traditions of each country. IFS Financials enables users to handle the most common payment flows, regardless of type, in all countries, whether one payment method, or a mixture of several, is used. IFS Financials also enables payments in several subsidiaries to be registered simultaneously—including invoices and reconciliation of deliveries. The solution automatically keeps track of the different subsidiaries’ internal credit balances and debts, considerably simplifying the centralization of the treasury function and purchasing. All the information in IFS Financials that generates taxes also creates tax transactions that are saved separately in the system. This makes it extremely easy to make queries and write reports in line with the requirements of each country. Tax reconciliation against the general ledger is also greatly facilitated. The standard version of the solution includes rules and processes for U.S. Sales/Use Tax in addition to various
forms of VAT handling. The fixed assets functionality in IFS Financials is the perfect solution for a global enterprise because of the freedom it provides to define rules and handle special cases. At the same time, it ensures complete transaction history. Issues handled include rules for depreciation, time limits on the handling of exceptions, reporting, etc.
The financials system—a control instrument for your operations
By locating the accounting rules in a separate component,
we give the accounts department total control and extreme flexibility. We have created a financials solution that is extremely easy to use—the ideal tool for controlling and analyzing your operations. IFS believes that the system’s primary function—keeping the accounts in order—is just the beginning. It has to work well and it must be convenient. But this is not what determines how useful it is to your enterprise. What makes the difference is when you can use the financials system as an instrument to control and analyze your operations—that’s when you start to make money on it.
Easier follow-up and analysis
IFS Financials is so easy to use that report design can be decentralized. You decide what information you want,
when you want it, and in whichever format you want it. Despite the fact that the financials system contains some of the most business-critical information in your enterprise, it’s rarely used as a tool for follow-up or analysis. The reason is that traditional systems seldom allow users to follow up or analyze operations on their own terms. IFS Financials eliminates this problem, providing you with a solution that works on your terms at all levels. The solution enables users to quickly and easily go to the source of information in your enterprise’s different subsystems. They can search for all the information displayed on the screen. And there’s more. Since our report generator is an end-user tool you don’t have to be an expert to use it. And because all users can create their own reports with the generator, creating the right report with correct data is extremely straightforward.
Don’t make supplier invoices more expensive than they are
Supplier invoices cost between US $50 and US $80 in internal administration. But the time invested in checking deliveries against invoices and chasing approvals from buyers is not just expensive—it adds absolutely no value and doesn’t save a penny since the invoices are normally correct. For enterprises with large volumes of invoices, the costs can be enormous. With IFS Financials you can lower costs dramatically yet gain better control of your invoices, because the solution allows you to focus your attention on exceptions, i.e. the invoices that don’t tally with the order you placed. The most ingenious way to tackle this problem is to raise the quality at the source. For example, you can insert purchasing rules directly into the system and make them mandatory for buyers so that they can’t send a purchase order unless they detail where it should be booked. This is not as difficult as it might seem because the interface to our solution can be designed as a personal portal where information can be tailored to the needs of each user. In this case, you just add the purchasing rules to the portal. This way the accounts department always knows which account, and other accounting dimensions, a purchase should be entered in—and doesn’t have to handle reams of paper to verify this. Even approval of supplier invoices is done electronically with our solution. Each day, via their personal portal, buyers are presented with a list of invoices, which they can approve by simply pressing a couple of buttons. We even offer predefined interfaces to various systems for scanning paper-based invoices to be scanned. This means that users only need to work with electronic documentation. Naturally, we offer ready-made EDI solutions. One of the most sophisticated ways of receiving supplier invoices is, quite simply, to invoice yourself. Instead of continuously receiving new invoices that have to be checked against deliveries and orders, your enterprise can invoice itself according to the agreement and the quantity to be delivered, giving you complete control over the entire chain. Payment is made according to the agreement only, and according to how much is actually delivered. Your enterprise saves money by automating the payment process; the supplier gains by not having to administer invoices—a win-win situation in other words. We have already implemented several advanced self-billing solutions in the U.S. and Sweden.
Stop chasing shadows—concentrate on the risks
Our solution helps you monitor customer credit by checking for deviations and then automatically notifying the credit controller. IFS Financials makes the credit controller’s job significantly easier—by letting the IT system look for deviations and then notifying the credit controller. This works thanks to our IFS/Event Server software, which sends messages when certain events occur or when predefined limits are exceeded. It might be a customer who is late in paying or a customer whose credit has been extended. As a result, credit controllers can focus on real problems—where there’s a potential risk or something is simply not right—so that customer credits and invoices that are unproblematic are not treated as if they were. Information can also be sent as an e-mail, an SMS message or directly to a handheld computer. The system is incredibly flexible, ensuring swift access to critical information.
Faster, better overview gives increased freedom of action
Now you can make cash flow forecasts with a longer time perspective. IFS’ special portals for cash managers enable them to see more than customer and supplier invoices—they can also see customer orders as well as purchase orders and forward agreements. One of the best ways to work with cash management is to scrutinize customer and supplier invoices. By comparing these, and adding fixed costs like salary, taxes and interest on loans, cash managers get a clear overview of liquidity in the near future. IFS Financials is more than just a first-class instrument for accomplishing these tasks—it also gives you tools for prolonging the forecast period. This is done by adding customer orders and purchase orders to the statistics.
A customer order becomes an invoice after a few months, and a purchase order eventually becomes a supplier invoice. True, these figures will be less certain, but they still give you a good idea of what your cash flow will look like.
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