A Financial Application Implementation’s Secret Sauce

You did it.

Whether or not it was part of your company’s efforts to join the digital economy (let’s say for your benefit that, yes, it was a digital economy thing), you led the charge to review and select a modern, technically-advanced and wholly malleable software platform to replace your outdated, inefficient internal financial solution.

It’s a big deal. Something likely weighing you down mentally for some time. You’ve been playing catch-up long enough. Probably the only thing evolving quicker than the needs, complexity and customer demands of financial processes today is the technology that supports it.

You’re done. Mission accomplished.

Wait, wait, wait, OK, not quite yet. 

This likely wholesale facelift of your organization’s most critical financial processes needs to be properly weaved into existing systems.

And, yes, while every software implementation has its share of ups and downs, surprises, peaks and pain points, there’s really no implementation like a financial application implementation in terms of sheer ‘fun and excitement.’ Numbers need to line up. Continuity and trust are a must.

As Pramod Anavangot, Senior Director of Product Management at RecVue, notes, implementing a new system or tool not only helps bring automation, improves costs and reduces inefficiencies, “it also brings consistency and accuracy into the process.

“In the financial arena, this means an additional, humongous task associated with the system transition process,” said Anavangot. “It is around how to transition the inflight contracts, transactions and data into the transition process.”

Don’t Get Hurt, Make Sure to Convert

This is one of the biggest challenges when changing financial software in that you end up having to do a lot of the data transfer manually because many solutions don’t allow you to export data from one and import it into another.

To do this properly, a financial application implementation process requires a conversion of all applicable in-flight contracts and associated balances into the new, incoming application. This conversion is then followed by a validation process to confirm the balances from the conversion didn’t change and remain tied to the correct general ledger balance for each and every customer.

The Opposite of Low Key Importance

As you would expect, or if not, then you should definitely know, the conversion process typically can be both time-consuming and complicated.

It’s also pretty important.

If you don’t get the financial conversion process right during your implementation, your customer balances will be incorrect. Not good.

“The added responsibility in this process is to substantiate that by transitioning into the new tool there are no changes to the financial aspects of these contracts or, if so, those need to be audited, reasoned out and finalized by the management,” said RecVue’s Anavangot. “This step is extremely important for the go-forward health of the tools and the process.”

Yes, the ongoing happiness and contentment of your customers are all dependent on the success of that financial conversion piece of your implementation.

Because each of those - sometimes intricate - customer transactions must be correctly routed, you need to convert data all at once. Otherwise, you will be processing transactions for the same account in two different - vastly, different - systems. 

If you have any experience converting from one financial system to another, then you know that customer data conversion is the most critical piece of the entire process. But it doesn't have to be fearful. 

You Have Options

RecVue recognized this pain from the get-go.

Through the experience of implementing many customers and many more business models, the RecVue solution has a two-part painkiller provision. The company’s founding fathers incorporated into the software product multiple strategy options to be considered for the data conversion portion of the implementation process.

These options are designed to best fit customer needs:

1. Replication - uploading the beginning balances
2. Simulation - apply new rules and requirements, and calculate independently

And as the second of the two-part delivery service, the RecVue solution provides a utility to automate the conversion process by collecting only the relevant and minimum historical data.

Paired together, these truly innovative conversion features ensure an easier process for faster and a higher percentage of success in reconciliation.

For the amount of pain, effort and costly implications financial conversion could cause when done improperly, this is a true differentiator for the RecVue solution.

By employing these features, your financial application implementation time to go-live was significantly reduced.

Each customer must choose the right strategy from these options, so decisions must be made with great care in selecting which route to take.

If your company is in the medium to enterprise range, replication is likely the proper route. For a smaller organization, taking the time to devote and engage with the simulation route is most likely a better choice.

In any case, your implementation also comes with the people charged with overseeing the process to ensure it goes smoothly. While unable to make decisions for their customers, your implementation team will be your sounding board to bounce off ideas, advice, questions and clarifications.

​Maybe not quite yet to ‘Mission Accomplished,’ but closer.

Contact us today to learn more about how all the not-so-little things surrounding the most advanced billing, revenue and partner compensation platform have been intricately designed to help your enterprise achieve digital economy nirvana.