Dreading the Third-Quarter Close? Movaris Offers Help

Expanding on its OneClose solution for automating quarterly and yearly financial closes, Movaris today announced Account Reconciliation, software that automates the process of comparing account information drawn from various sources, flagging variances, and making corrections, arguably the hardest and least desirable work involved in closing the books. One out of every five SEC material weakness filings are due to account reconciliation mistakes. Options backdating, for instance, is the hot issue at the moment for the SEC and many of its subjects. The reconciliation process has historically taken place through Excel spreadsheets and email. One Account Reconciliation module scopes the work of scheduling and ranking of reconciliation tasks, so that, for instance, if you have thousands of reconciliations to go through, you can look first at high-risk or high-value accounts, or those that haven't been reconciled successfully in two months. Another provides an aggregated view of unlocated differences (where balances don't match but the reason hasn't been located) across the enterprise that taken together present a major problem. A general tie-out manager alerts people to late-adjusting entries and ensures that before you finalize the numbers, you're looking at all the late-adjusting entries to make sure they were authorized and booked correctly. Consoles give users a picture of these various activities and how close they are to completion; these consoles are drillable so users can click down to the details of any issue that crops up. Pricing ranges from $500,000 to $2 million. ROI could be achieved, the company says, by saving money on outside consulting and audit fees and improving efficiency within the finance organization.

The OneClose backstory is this: Movaris started out four years ago providing simple workflow software based on Microsoft Outlook. Over that time it developed the far more complex OneClose suite, released in the fourth quarter of 2005, which is workflow/business process management software specifically for handling financial closes, including Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and the generation of financial statements. "We've taken a sophisticated BPM technology and addressed what we view as the key problems of senior financial executives," says Eric Keller, CEO and president of Movaris, who was a Silicon Valley CFO for 20 years. OneClose helps them track the finance department's work and ensure all the proper procedures have been followed to prepare financial statements in accordance with GAAP, good business practice, SOX, and common sense, and prevent forgotten steps and innocent errors. The software runs on any standard database, any app server, any web server, and the client software runs on Internet Explorer.