Managing 30 different systems for their 35 entities was cumbersome for PR Finance Group, leading to manual data entry, excessive workloads, growing errors, and unreliable reporting.
Since 2004, the PR Finance Group Limited has been offering financing services to customers throughout Australia. As a leading integrated finance company, the PR Finance Group Limited has established themselves within the Australian market, offering short-term finance solutions, alternative car financing, and short-term equity on secure loans for business and investment purposes.
They were managing 30 separate systems to account for their 35 corporate entities. Jumping between systems to view or post transactions within the different company segments was becoming increasingly time consuming and inefficient. Managing all these separate entities on separate systems made it challenging to consolidate data for reporting purposes. As a company experiencing continuous growth, their ERP needs were rapidly growing, and the need to simplify their accounting operations was crucial for keeping up with this growth. Having outgrown their previous system, they were looking for a solution that would ensure they were not duplicating their processing efforts and minimizing the workload their accounting team managed.
“Our annual reporting was a total nightmare, taking more than three weeks to complete”
— Lyn Donnelly, Management Accountant at PR Finance Group Ltd.
Due to the amount of manual work involved in handling 30 separate systems, the accounts team was overwhelmed with data entry tasks. This led to mounting errors as PR Finance Group was trying to scale.
With so many separate systems for different entities, they paid liabilities through cash transfers from one account to another. This step required the additional help of two extra team members to process these transactions, and inevitably needed a considerable amount of time and resulted in a large number of data entry errors due to the manual nature of the entries.
They were managing 70 bank accounts within the business to facilitate intercompany transactions between their 35 corporate entities. This created a great deal of work within the accounting department as their team had to manually enter each side of the transactions and then ensure everything was balancing correctly across multiple systems.
As there was no centralized system, consolidated financial statements were heavy on administration with information collected from separate systems before being consolidated. They required software that could manage and produce reports for their individual operating units, in addition to consolidated corporate reporting for the entity as a whole.
Being a financial company, this was essential to comply with regulations and maintain and ensure the highest integrity to serve their clients better.
“Overall, we have happier staff that can easily produce auditable reports with certainty and feel more confident in their roles.”
— Lyn Donnelly, Management Accountant at PR Finance Group Ltd.
As a group with three divisions, it was essential for them to integrate their 35 standalone systems with their ERP upgrade. To ensure securely managed intercompany transactions, PR Finance turned to Microsoft Dynamics and Binary Stream’s Multi-Entity Management software.
“With the help of the Multi-Entity Management software, we have gradually been closing bank accounts. One of the main benefits of this solution has been that we no longer have to transfer money between our 70 bank accounts for intercompany transactions and to coordinate vendor payments for our three divisions.”
— Lyn Donnelly, Management Accountant at PR Finance Group Ltd.
The consolidation of their 30 systems into a single centralized ERP system saved time by eliminating and streamlining transaction processing while still maintaining the highest security levels.
Not only did Multi-Entity Management cut down on arduous processes, but it provides the group with scalable infrastructure to manage further entities as they grow.
Automation eliminated much of the time spent on intercompany processing and reduced the data entry errors created by manually entering transactions.
Allowing transactions to be completed among the separate entities created a faster, cleaner workflow and reduced the number of bank accounts needed.
The chart of accounts enables all entities to ensure consistent data entry across vendors. It also gives them the ability to create only one vendor file shared across multiple entities, with over 50 shared creditors, this was a significant benefit for the group.
With much of their decision-making based on dashboard reporting, the PR Finance Group was now feeding better data to their management. This data now accurately reflected what was happening in third-party databases and integrated this data with their transaction information.
