The chart of accounts right first time.
The agent asks your customer's finance team about entities, accounts, dimensions, the calendar, approvals and bank accounts, following what your consultant set out. You sign it off. The finance system comes out configured.
Cost centres roll up, and the agent knows which ones do not yet.
Forty-six cost centres, forty of them shared across the group, three levels deep with more than one top. The same rows carry the reporting order, so what rolls up into what and what is reported after what are one picture. A cost centre with no parent and nothing under it is not a top: it sits apart until someone places it, and the agent asks.
The five decisions every finance implementation argues about.
What is a dimension, and what is an account?
The agent asks what each segment of the old code means, and settles which become dimensions and which stay accounts, following the rule your consultant wrote.
Every finance team has a chart of accounts that grew by accident. Department, cost centre and project are baked into the account code, so the chart has four hundred accounts where it needs sixty.
The new system can hold those as dimensions, and nobody decides which is which until the data load fails.
Which company reports to which.
The agent asks for the companies, which one consolidates, and the base and reporting currency of each, and settles the structure your consultant said a group like this should have.
Nine companies, two of them dormant, one in Scotland with its own auditor. The group consolidates somewhere, and everybody assumes it is obvious.
It is not written down anywhere until a consultant asks, three weeks in, and the answer changes the entity structure.
Who closes the period, and when.
The agent asks how the year runs, who closes what and in what order, and settles the calendar and the locking rules the way your consultant set them out.
Year end is 31 March. Beyond that, the calendar is folklore: which periods are open, who locks them, whether the sub-ledgers close before the ledger.
The system needs an answer for every one, and the customer gives it on the day they first try to post into a locked month.
Who can post what, and who approves it.
The agent asks who posts and who approves in each company, what the limits are and who covers when someone is away, and settles every cell the way your consultant set it out, including the ones the customer rules out.
The approval limits are in an email from four years ago. The finance director approves anything over five thousand, unless she is away, in which case somebody does.
The system wants an answer for every role in every company: who posts, who approves a journal, and who stands in when the approver is out. Nobody at the customer has ever written it down in one place.
Which bank account feeds which ledger, and who releases the money.
The agent asks for the accounts in each company, which ledger each one feeds, and who prepares and who releases a payment run, and settles the bank setup the way your consultant set out.
Nine companies, fourteen bank accounts, and one of them belongs to a company that no longer trades. Two accounts feed the same ledger and nobody is sure which is the main one.
A payment run needs to know which account it draws on, who prepares it and who releases it. Those are three different people, and the customer has never named them together.
What leaves.
For a finance system the export holds the companies and their currencies, the chart of accounts with its dimensions and values, the cost centres in their tree and order, the opening periods and who can open and close them, the approval limits and the bank accounts. It goes out as a file or by API, in the format the finance system expects, after you sign it off. Nothing goes near the system before that.
Who this is for.
Why finance first.
Finance is where an implementation goes wrong most expensively and where the judgement is most codifiable: the same decisions about dimensions, entities and close, made slightly differently at every customer.
It's where we started because it's where a specification earns the most.
See it on your own setup.
A 20-minute call. Bring the finance workbook your team uses today and we'll show you what Votis reads from it.
See it on your setup