Decision Inc. delivers automated financial consolidation solution to Citadel Wealth Management

About Decision Inc.

Decision Inc. is a global leader in information-driven transformation with a core focus on data, digital and performance intelligence. Our expertise in technology and industry specialisations has enabled us to help companies around the world make better decisions faster. Our emphasis on local excellence and global scale enables us to bring clients best-of-breed technology solutions that enable significant improvement while leveraging our global research and innovation teams to accelerate the time to insight. Our local consulting teams are experts in the implementation, support and execution of these solutions and work with our clients to deliver real results and improvement.

The requirement

Wealth management specialist, Citadel, approached Decision Inc. to provide them with a solution to produce financial and managerial reports within a single system.

The business processes and operations related to financial consolidation, month-end close and management reporting were identified as areas that could be optimised through better use of technology and the elimination of manual data capturing and management. Decision Inc. was asked to optimise and modernise this process by using the latest technology and allow the team to focus on analysis, rather than manual preparation of financial statements and reports.

The solution

Decision Inc. spent time reviewing Citadel’s business processes and held workshops with Citadel’s key subject matter experts. They identified the Board Financial Consolidation (BFC) application as having the capabilities to automate the financial consolidation of Citadel’s complex group structure.

Board is an intelligent planning platform that integrates strategy, finance and operations, enabling full control of performance across the organisation. By unifying business intelligence (BI), corporate performance management and predictive analytics, the Board platform allows companies to produce a single, accurate and complete view of business performance.

Decision Inc. implemented Board for Citadel and the following four key functions were configured according to Citadel’s own business rules:

• Admin – the admin capsule is used to configure the consolidation parameters for a specific period and scenario. These configurations include user capabilities, application controls, workflow, account settings, organisation set-up and validation rules.
• Process – the process capsule runs through all the required consolidation tasks to take the unconsolidated trial balance values to consolidated figures used for reporting and disclosure. These tasks include data collection, exchange rate tables, currency translations, inter-company reconciliations, adjustments, eliminations and balance carry forward.
• Reporting – the reporting capsule visualises all the internal reports. These reports include income statements, the balance sheet, notes and management accounts.
• Audit – the audit screen is used to review changes and updates made by users. This allows Citadel full transparency over the consolidation process.

The benefits

By doing away with the time-consuming, manual tasks traditionally associated with the financial consolidation process, Citadel can now perform both legal and management consolidation more quickly and without key-man dependencies. The single database approach ensures that Citadel reports represent a single version of the truth, allowing multiple users to work on the consolidation simultaneously, with reduced risk of error.