Networking has always been a vital part of the COLLABORATE experience. Although things have changed, OATUG is still providing valuable options for networking during its Online Forum – a digital platform for presenters and attendees to connect.
Don’t miss your chance to take part in discussions with AST experts and executives to get your questions answered. Click here to join! We’ll be sure to engage and collaborate with you to bring your ideas to fruition.
Tax rules and regulations vary widely across different countries, and complying with them can cause many headaches for multinational corporations. Even within the United States, taxes can differ dramatically across state, county, city, and even district lines.
How on earth do you keep up with all of this?
NetSuite has the perfect solution for you: SuiteTax.
NetSuite recently developed SuiteTax, an indirect tax solution that determines and calculates taxes across multiple tax jurisdictions. Built within the NetSuite platform, SuiteTax seamlessly integrates tax calculation and reporting within your applications. So, if you’re using NetSuite’s sales, billing, revenue recognition, and payment processing features, you no longer have to worry about whether you’re calculating taxes correctly around the US and the world.
There are three main bundles you can take advantage of, all of which use the SuiteTax API. They are SuiteTax for USA and VAT Countries (which includes over 140+ countries), SuiteTax for India, and SuiteTax for Brazil. We’ll focus primarily on the USA and VAT countries.
There are myriad benefits that come with using SuiteTax, both in general and region-specific.
Overall, SuiteTax helps your company:
Within the United States, SuiteTax will:
Within VAT Countries, SuiteTax:
Do you want this functionality in your NetSuite ERP? There are a couple of things you’ll need to do before getting started with the setup of SuiteTax, such as:
We will walk you through this process and make your SuiteTax implementation successful!
This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.
Have you been enjoying your OATUG online sessions? We certainly have and we want to help you find the solution that suits your needs.
Tuesday, April 21 at 12:00 PM EDT – “Oracle CPQ Implementation for Configure to Order and Engineered to Order Business”
https://ams.oatug.org/OnlineForum/sessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=11838
Learn how Oracle CPQ replaced the legacy quoting application to support their evolving lead to cash process at one of the leading manufacturers of commercial, nuclear and navy valves. Understand how a highly complex ‘Engineered to Order’ and ‘Designed to Order’ solution lead to a significantly error free and automated configuration even for huge orders!
Wednesday, April 22 at 2:00 PM EDT – “A Case Study of Streamlining Account Reconciliation Process in Public Sector”
https://ams.oatug.org/OnlineForum/sessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=11630
Learn how Events DC deployed Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud Service (ARCS) and successfully transformed not only the reconciliation process but also streamlined financial close process.
Attend our sessions and let us know what your concerns are. We’d love the opportunity to chat with you about the latest cloud trends and how we can work together to transform your organization.
Don’t forget to include one or more of AST’s sessions in your schedule – we’re sure to have at least one that fits your needs! You can track all sessions here.
Tuesday, April 21 at 12:00 PM EDT – “Oracle CPQ Implementation for Configure to Order and Engineered to Order Business”
https://ams.oatug.org/OnlineForum/sessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=11838
Learn how Oracle CPQ replaced the legacy quoting application to support their evolving lead to cash process at one of the leading manufacturers of commercial, nuclear and navy valves. Understand how a highly complex ‘Engineered to Order’ and ‘Designed to Order’ solution lead to a significantly error free and automated configuration even for huge orders!
This is your opportunity to network with AST experts, executives, and other users in the Oracle community and get all your cloud questions answered! Exclusively for event registrants, recordings of all sessions will be available on-demand following the live event, so you can view and learn at your convenience.
Due to the evolving COVID-19 situation, the OATUG is “lifting and shifting” content from the COLLABORATE 20 – OATUG Forum to the OATUG Forum Online. This series of live interactive events kicks off April 20, 2020 with Innovation Week, keynote speakers, Oracle roadmap updates, strategic insights and case studies presented by industry experts.
Don’t forget to attend one or more of AST’s sessions – we’re sure to have at least one that fits your needs! You can see all the available sessions in the Forum Online Portal.
Monday, April 20 at 10:30 AM EDT – “Bringing the Budget Book Development Process into the 21st Century”
https://ams.oatug.org/OnlineForum/sessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=11760
Get a sneak peek into Oracle Narrative Reporting has helped us streamline the budget book development process. We’ll talk about the features we chose to utilize, discuss their pros and cons, build overview, training strategy, benefits of the tool and share our future plans.
Tuesday, April 21 at 12:00 PM EDT – “Oracle CPQ Implementation for Configure to Order and Engineered to Order Business”
https://ams.oatug.org/OnlineForum/sessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=11838
Learn how Oracle CPQ replaced the legacy quoting application to support their evolving lead to cash process at one of the leading manufacturers of commercial, nuclear and navy valves. Understand how a highly complex ‘Engineered to Order’ and ‘Designed to Order’ solution lead to a significantly error free and automated configuration even for huge orders!
Wednesday, April 22 at 2:00 PM EDT – “A Case Study of Streamlining Account Reconciliation Process in Public Sector”
https://ams.oatug.org/OnlineForum/sessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=11630
Learn how Events DC deployed Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud Service (ARCS) and successfully transformed not only the reconciliation process but also streamlined financial close process.
Monday, April 27 at 10:30 AM EDT – “Moving to the Cloud: What I Wish I Knew Before I Started”
https://ams.oatug.org/OnlineForum/sessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=11713
Cloud is a simple concept but has too many options to count. After years of architecting cloud solutions for over a dozen companies, we will review the highlights of those initiatives, and cover the major categories of cloud, when they make sense, and how companies are using them today.
Tuesday, April 28 at 2:00 PM EDT – “A Case Study of Modernizing Master Data Management at Tampa Airport”
https://ams.oatug.org/OnlineForum/sessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=11755
This session will compare and contrast the implementation use cases and best practices for Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud (EDMCS) and Data Relationship Management (DRM). EDMCS started as next-generation solution of DRM, which it already surpasses it many ways. We will discuss the migration approach, lessons learned, and provide valuable insights to help customers position EDMCS for maximum enterprise value as the product continues to evolve.
If you haven’t already, register today for one of the most exciting weeks of the year in the Oracle community!
When planning their implementation, most of our clients struggle to assign their users the right roles and responsibilities. Most admin security groups have to constantly walk the tightrope of providing too much or insufficient access to key functions within the application. Too much access allows users to break generally accepted separation of duty rules, which may lead to fraud or exposure of key sensitive information. Of course, too little access causes communication overhead between departments and individuals as they try to gather all the data necessary for their job function.
When explained that clearly, we can all see that this would be problematic. Large systems like Oracle ERP Cloud have thousands of tasks, roles and privileges that provide a myriad of overlapping capabilities that may lead to conflicts within the separation of duties (SOD). In addition, if you’re subject to SOX compliance or similar legislation, there are key considerations of which you need to be aware that further complicate the process.
Let’s discuss the pros and cons of access security as offered by Oracle ERP Cloud, a leader in the cloud computing arena. Oracle ERP Cloud uses role-based access control (RBAC). Access to functions and data is defined at the role level rather than at the user level, which is the most efficient way to manage security, especially in large organizations that require scalability. This reduces an administrator’s effort as roles are maintained at a higher level and can be assigned to multiple users that perform the same role.
Three security types are available:
Within the Oracle Financials Cloud module, for example, there are several common job roles that come “out of the box.” These Seeded Roles can be used as delivered or modified to suit your business. Or, you can create new roles from scratch. Think of General Ledger Manager or Accounts Payable specialist as typical job roles.
The advantages of using Seeded Roles are very much in line with the benefits that Oracle promotes for adopting ERP Cloud:
But when you dig deeper and consider SOD and SOX compliance, the disadvantages of using the Seeded Roles come to light.
Standardization brings many benefits, but, as always, there’s a downside. Oracle assumes that the Seeded Roles will fit your organization with very little customization and that the pre-defined Oracle Cloud SOD policies used to design the seeded roles will adequately test the risks in your business. Oracle states that the duty definitions in seeded roles have been defined using their best practices approach, although these best practices policies have not been documented and are not available for general user review. With SOD policies not being available, and no easy means of reporting on SOD violations, users can be left in the dark about the suitability of their security. As experienced security implementers, we know that this is often the case.
Short of purchasing very expensive Risk and Compliance software that includes detailed audits of SOD violations, an alternative is to work with expert implementers who have created hybrid roles that meet internal and external Auditor requirements as well as SOX compliance reviews. The hybrid roles incorporate seeded Oracle roles with modifications that take into consideration “normal” business requirements. Since few companies are one size fits all, these can further be modified by completing a series of questions that will address specific considerations.
This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.
Dear AST Community,
We hope this message finds you well, both mentally and physically. While there is a lot of uncertainty and fear in the world, we want you to feel assured about AST. We remain committed to the safety of our employees, customers and their respective families. Simultaneously, we are committed to managing the continuity of our business and mitigating risks through innovation, communication, and technology.
We began communicating guidelines and recommendations related to the virus to AST employees in January. Since then AST has closed all offices globally, restricted international travel, banned employee gatherings, and instituted self-quarantine restrictions for travelers. We then worked with each customer to determine a plan of action that would ensure the safety of all, while still meeting project dates and milestones. Our goal is to enable our teams to work remotely and avoid additional travel and exposure. We have been largely successful. 100% of our staff is grounded from air travel until April 1 and are well-equipped to work remotely. We will continue to evaluate to determine if this travel ban will be extended.
Rather than following a variety of news outlets, we are continuously monitoring the most reliable and up-to-date sources: CDC and WHO. We are also watching legislation related to health coverage and have developed a contingency plan in the event any employee contracts the virus.
The AST Leadership Team meets once a day at a minimum to collectively determine our responsive actions, and we are committed to proactively leading our people through the crisis. We focus daily on both the physical and mental health of the entire AST family, as well as business continuity planning. Ongoing communications will ensure that we continue to dialogue with employees and customers in a meaningful way.
Thank you for your understanding of the developing situation. We recognize that some inconveniences may be experienced, but we will do our best to minimize them in our efforts to keep safety top-of-mind while still meeting or exceeding our business obligations. Rest assured, we will get through this crisis as an organization and we will continue to support and communicate to our customers.
Sincerely,
Justin Winter
CEO, AST LLC
Aging infrastructure and the rising costs of maintaining applications on-premise or in a Co-Lo facility are building a strong business case for safeguarding your technology investments with Cloud infrastructure.
Attend our local, live seminar to learn how other California agencies are reducing TCO and maximizing ROI with AST and Oracle Cloud.
If you are facing a decline in system reliability, increased costs, or a lack of scalability with your on-premises enterprise applications, join us for a morning of collaborative discussion about AST’s Lift and Shift to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI Gen 2), including a live customer testimonial and success story!
Attendees will participate in a discussion with AST and Oracle Cloud experts about:
The morning will also include a guest speaker from a current AST government client in California, who will present on the challenges they faced and the successes they’ve realized with an AST Lift and Shift to OCI.
Seats are limited for this event, so register today and join us in Sacramento on December 5 for a lively discussion about how AST and Oracle can modernize your applications in the Cloud!
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, almost 30 percent of the working age population in the U.S. and Europe derive some or all of their income from independent work. In case you are wondering, that’s more than 160 million people or, put another way, more than the entire populations of the U.K. and Germany combined.
The pros and cons of the rise of the “gig economy” are well documented, but there’s one area that doesn’t get as much attention as it should: How can independent workers get paid?
This is a tricky question as most organizations don’t have an easy or automated way of paying independent workers. The result: Slow, costly and antiquated processes like a live check.
This problem needs to be solved. Organizations need streamlined, real-time payments and processes to cut costs and retain top talent. Independent workers need timely and secure payments and want full visibility into the process. And full-time employees want new approaches to be applied to travel and expense management.
Capitalizing on the Opportunity to Make Customers’ Lives Better
To meet these needs, there is a massive shift occurring in the banking and ERP industry. Banks are using API technology to enable open banking, while ERP providers are embracing the latest fintech innovations to try and solve this challenge. Oracle NetSuite is leading this push with its Banking as a Service (BaaS) program, which enables fintechs, treasury banks and other financial institutions to turn connectivity into awesome customer experiences and repeatable services. This is all done directly inside the NetSuite platform. With NetSuite, it’s as simple as installing an app on your phone – you simply select, install, authenticate or setup and you are able to transact!
One example of this is the work with Visa. With NetSuite, Visa is creating the Card Payouts SuiteApp which, in cooperation with treasury banks, will provide the ability to allow funds to be delivered safely, quickly and conveniently via “push payments.” Visa Direct, Visa’s real-time push payments platform, and the Card Payout SuiteApp, reverse the direction of a transaction on the Visa network, “pushing” money to accounts using eligible debit cards.
‘Built for NetSuite’ Helps Ensure Quality and Scalability
The Card Payouts SuiteApp has achieved ‘Built for NetSuite’ status. This is a program for NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Network (SDN) partners that provides the information, resources and methodology to help ensure that the applications and integrations, built using the NetSuite SuiteCloud Computing Platform, meet NetSuite’s standards and best practices.
The Card Payouts SuiteApp will go live when the first treasury bank participates. Treasury banks participating in the pilot will be able to offer their business clients the opportunity to download the Card Payouts app from the NetSuite SuiteApp store. The SuiteApp is built to support card capture, tokenization and card-on-file payment transactions.
Calling all Treasury Banks
To make all this possible, Visa is helping its partners by creating a card-based, front-end user experience for treasury banks that integrates with their existing infrastructure. This cool new service helps expedite payments by leveraging Visa’s deep experience in risk authentication and fraud mitigation and NetSuite’s Banking as a Service program. The combination will enable corporate payments that are safe, fast, reliable and secure.
This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.
Financial services firms are intently focused on the challenges of competing in fast-changing, competitive markets. At these firms, finance executives and managers are expected to play a pivotal role by supplying visibility into financial performance and helping to shape strategic direction.
Yet many finance executives are bogged down by inefficient legacy financial management systems that lack flexibility and provide limited insight into the business. Labor-intensive manual processes and data silos are undercutting the ability of finance executives to innovate, help drive growth and achieve business objectives.
A new study conducted for NetSuite by research consultancy Gatepoint Research examines key challenges, trends, and opportunities in financial management. The survey polled over 100 finance professionals, including CFOs, VPs and directors of finance, and controllers working predominantly in the financial services industry, including brokerage firms, insurers, and credit unions.
This report summarizes the findings of the survey and outlines:
By a sizable margin, improving operations and production is the top pressure facing finance executives and their teams over the next 18 months, cited by 58% of respondents. The digital economy, globalization, and the accelerating speed of business are some of the factors that have made greater operational and production efficiency in finance a top objective to achieve competitive advantage.
For many finance departments, improving operations means handling more data and transactions, speeding delivery of key reports, improving cross-department collaboration, and better-serving customers with flexible billing options and online visibility into accounts and transactions. Such initiatives have traditionally required additional resource allocations, but that would be at odds with the second top pressure facing finance execs—cost reduction.
Nearly half (47%) of respondents say they are under pressure to cut costs—to do more with less staff. But as substantiated in a subsequent survey question, legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial management environments make cost-cutting difficult because of system inflexibility, poor visibility, and lack of integration (see Figure 3). Legacy systems typically grow more complex over time as new applications and data sources are introduced without adequate integration. That means more manual work, reduced visibility, and diminished returns from ERP investments, even as business pressures grow.
The third top pressure (46%) is creating and managing growth (meaning more users and demands), while the fourth top pressure is helping to launch new technologies and products (36%). These pressures align with rising expectations among the CEO, board of directors, investors, and other stakeholders for the CFO and other finance executives to step up and play a greater role in innovation and driving organizational strategy and growth.
Many finance executives find it difficult to meet those expectations. In fact, a separate study of 338 finance executives for NetSuite by the research firm Loudhouse found that 68% of them were too consumed by tactical day-to-day activities in legacy software environments to innovate and increase the level of strategic corporate contributions.
Finance executives view improving employee productivity as the area that could generate the greatest impact on operational performance, cited by 44% of respondents. This high ranking is unsurprising given that accounting teams often spend inordinate amounts of time on labor-intensive data work, often with multiple Excel spreadsheets and even paper printouts.
It’s not uncommon for finance team members to have to manually enter or reconcile sales orders between a financial application and a separate customer relationship management (CRM) system or fetch data from several front- and back-office systems to run reports in Excel. These time-consuming and error-prone processes not only hurt personnel productivity—they can degrade overall performance through delays, poor visibility and contradictory data in multiple systems.
Better budgeting and forecasting is another area (38%) for high-impact operational improvement. Because many ERP systems lack built-in budgeting and forecasting, finance teams typically export data into Excel for analysis. Though effective, Excel can’t supply the robust reporting and analytics possible in a dedicated tool.
Finance executives also see ample room for improvement in managing regulatory compliance (36%) and accelerating financial close and reporting times (36%). Ever-changing accounting standards can be difficult to track and manage manually, and drawn-out financial close times are not uncommon, particularly when accountants need to round up, check and consolidate numbers from several different systems.
Inflexibility is the top pain point that finance professionals face with legacy ERP and financial management software. More than one-third (35%) of respondents see inflexibility and the inability to readily change workflows and business processes as key impediments to realizing more effective and efficient financial management.
In effect, these companies are straitjacketed by the rigidity of their legacy technology. They are often forced to adapt business processes within the constraints of the software rather than adapting the software to the needs of their business. As an alternative, companies may engage specialized software developers to try to customize their system to their particular needs, but those efforts can require significant investment over many weeks, if not months, and are not always guaranteed to be successful.
If customizations are implemented, they don’t carry over if the company wants to upgrade to the latest version of its vendor’s legacy software. As a result, many companies choose to make do with the status quo, effectively ‘version-locked’ within an outdated application. According to Forrester Research, “approximately half of ERP customers are on releases that are two versions behind the current release, which may be four years old or more.”
Moreover, various analyst firms that track IT spending estimate that maintenance fees and support costs for legacy software can range from 50% to more than 90% of a typical IT budget. In addition, legacy software runs on on-premise servers that require ongoing IT maintenance and troubleshooting. In-house storage, backup systems, and network infrastructure all add to IT cost and complexity, sapping an organization’s ability to invest in innovation that could help meet business goals.
Inadequate visibility into the business is another top concern, cited by 24% of respondents. This is the inevitable result of the third top pain point—poor integration between front- and back-office systems (22%). Finance teams frequently grapple with information silos that sprouted from tactical deployments by departments or as a result of mergers and acquisitions. Teams may also have to contend with rogue applications deployed in a business unit without IT oversight.
These poorly integrated and decentralized environments leave companies ill-equipped to adapt to fierce competition, regulatory reform and evolving customer needs. Finance professionals are often locked into inefficient manual processes, while executive management expects them to deliver accurate, timely information to provide a basis for informed decision-making.
Automation is a critical element in achieving effective financial management. Automated functions and workflow-driven processes help the finance team focus on innovation and high-value activities instead of manual work that drives up costs and introduces delays. Yet automation is lacking in several key finance functions, according to the Gatepoint survey.
Just 27% of finance teams surveyed have mostly or fully automated the processes needed to draw information from disparate systems. At the other end, 30% are poorly or somewhat automated in data-gathering. As a result, finance team members may have to become ‘Excel jockeys’ who focus on copying and pasting data from multiple systems and then reconciling that information to make it actionable for the business rather than working at a higher level to interpret that data.
Business analytics is another area in which automation is lacking in many organizations. Nearly one-quarter (24%) of respondents report that business analytics is poorly or somewhat automated, which indicates those organizations don’t have access to timely, accurate on-demand insights on which to base decision-making. Just more than a third (36%) of those surveyed have mostly or fully automated business analytics, despite the crucial role that analytics should play in enabling finance teams to track and analyze key metrics in near-real time.
Finance executives have a long wish list of characteristics they would like to see in an ideal financial management solution. The ability to integrate well with other systems tops the list, cited by 75% of respondents. With better integration, finance executives could significantly improve employee productivity—the top focus area for increasing operational performance (see Figure 2).
Good integration would also allow finance teams to minimize the manual work needed to draw information from disparate systems, ranked in our survey as the least automated of common finance functions (see Figure 4). As it is, the lack of integration across siloed systems is creating one or more bottlenecks that hold many finance teams back from meeting rising corporate expectations for greater visibility and efficiency.
Ease of use is another top characteristic on the wish list cited by 69% of respondents. This high ranking reflects the poor usability of many legacy financial management systems, particularly aging versions that have not been updated for years. Without an intuitive interface and functionality that users embrace, adoption will be limited, and users will resort to familiar spreadsheets and workarounds, introducing yet more data silos.
Visibility into the business is also seen as an essential characteristic of an ideal financial management solution. Like ease of use, its high ranking (cited by 67% of respondents) indicates that finance teams do not have adequate visibility with their current legacy systems. Poor visibility is not a mere inconvenience—it can lead to misinformed decisions that hurt the business simply because executives lack access to vital information.
Also highly ranked are scalability for growth (56%) and capabilities to support compliance (51%). The ideal solution should be able to accommodate growth dynamics, such as increasing transaction volumes, growing numbers of customers and suppliers, entering new international markets and introducing new lines of business. The latter two growth dynamics, in particular, can be difficult to achieve with inflexible systems that can be extended only with considerable time and investment.
Many organizations are turning to cloud-based financial management solutions to help them transform the finance function with greater visibility, efficiency, and control. Cloud-based financial management delivers real-time data, process automation and role-based dashboards and controls while enabling organizations to eliminate the cost and complexity of running and maintaining on-premise software and servers.
NetSuite is the cloud financial management solution of choice for many companies. Used by more than 24,000 organizations, NetSuite is ranked by Gartner as the world’s fastest-growing financial management solution within the top 10 by market share.
In addition, the NetSuite OneWorld global business solution was named the winner of the 2015 CODiE Award for ‘Best Financial Management Solution’ by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA).
Organizations that run NetSuite
As shown in Figure 6, companies that deploy NetSuite typically realize significant improvements in key performance areas. Key NetSuite capabilities for finance professionals include:
One single, integrated system. NetSuite’s unified solution eliminates data silos in a standardized environment that can cover ERP/financial management, CRM, e-commerce, HR, and professional services automation (PSA).
Built-in automation and compliance. Prebuilt and customizable workflows enable finance teams to automate routine tasks; finance can also leverage built-in support for such accounting standards as SOP 97-2, EITF 08-01, and ASU 2014-09.
On-demand visibility into real-time data. Finance teams have real-time data at their fingertips, either in a small or mid-size deployment or a global enterprise spanning dozens of international subsidiaries.
Robust reporting, budgeting, and forecasting. Finance professionals can easily run customized reports, while the NetSuite Financial Planning module delivers sophisticated budgeting, forecasting, and planning.
Rich customization and integrations. Finance teams can readily customize NetSuite to meet their unique business needs. They can also leverage native integration with leading third-party applications.
Automatic upgrades twice a year. Finance teams always use the most recent NetSuite version with twice-annual upgrades that are delivered automatically and leave any customizations intact.
For more information, please visit www.netsuite.com/erp.
This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.
