This year's Eurofinance 2013 Conference was held in the wonderful city of Barcelona. We know some of you managed to see at least some city sights and some to bring partners along for a few days during the week or at the weekend. On a previous visit my wife and I did some of the Gaudi sights Sagranda Familia, Park Guell with Gaudi's house museum and grand views and walks, certainly worth walking out at night to The Ramblas. Port Vell, do the aquarium, cable car and funicular railway (we are not on commission to the City of Barcelona!) but if you get the chance, do go. A special thank you to the contingent from Puig, based in Barcelona, the team posed for a photo, chatted about their use of the system… and gave us some excellent tips for local eating.
Payment Factories seem to be forever mentioned in the financial press. If your company makes payments to vendors that have a fixed bank routing and made regularly, say weekly, the Coprocess Vendor Payments module offers efficient third party payments functionality in a cost efficient way. It is not intended for making a payment run more than daily and it does not calculate the best payment routing based on various criteria. It can however offer various liquidity and cost benefits, it can sit alongside our multilateral netting and intercompany reconciliation modules too if you are a current client.
Coprocess has specialised in netting systems for over 25 years and has listened to the problems of many 00’s of companies over that time. In fact we have over 160 clients currently using our system.
For some corporates Intercompany can represent a large part of overall activity. However, time and again in these conversations we are told that their intercompany process is not smooth and is time consuming to reconcile. By which we mean bills have gone unpaid, they are missing important information or are just incorrect. Often invoices are blocked for payment and the dispute process is not rigorously followed. All these together make the reconciliation process, especially at month end, very time consuming and difficult. Mismatching of intercompany flows has a negative impact on the P&L and Balance Sheet of the consolidated accounts. In one case we know of, the auditors refused to sign off the accounts because the numbers in the Balance Sheet and P&L were unreliable.
I was catching up with my reading over the summer, an article in the International Treasurer magazine caught my eye ‘Cash Management: Don’t get Caught in the Netting’ (one can read it here, subscription required but, at the time of writing, a 30 day free trial is available). It is a report based on an International Treasurer User Group meeting. Essentially it says netting savings are great, but intercompany netting is all a bit manual and hard work. Clearly, having spent 20 years making the process as easy as possible this is a topic close to our hearts here at Coprocess. However it also stated that “getting multilateral netting right can save time and money”
Welcome to our first blog post! Actually, not just our first blog post but a blog post on a totally redesigned website. We’ve added lots of new material, there’s comments and testimonials from our clients, presentations and some white papers (we intend to add more over time), we also intend to publish a quarterly newsletter and now… a blog. We hope this will build into a library of helpful information and lively comment. We also hope it will help push the boundaries and provide topical help for our readers.
I mentioned our workshop formats in a previous post. We try to avoid these being a sales pitch by including a chance before and after the workshop to network with your compatriots and mingle with Coprocess staff, include 2 case studies, these are educational, given by our clients. They will discuss what problems they had before implementing our system, the implementation process and the new process and how things have improved.
