Financial Statements

Business Challenge

Our customer, a global financial services firm, depends on clear and accurate reporting within a constantly changing regulatory framework that varies from country to country.

More than 300 of our customer’s clients required reporting automation–with each client having up to 100 funds–that could be grouped into several presentation templates. Each group also had its own requirements.

Designing systems for quick decision making, operational efficiency, accurate accounting and regulatory compliance created a complex environment for application development. Our customer assigned high priority to this project because the penalties for inaccurate financial statements or late filing can be extremely costly.

This project required data management from a large number of independent mutual funds whose performance results required meticulous consolidation and reporting to multiple clients. The project was designed to automate this complex reporting and eliminate numerous time-consuming processes.

Solution

The uniqueness of the project stemmed from the need to manage a large number of alternative investment funds, with each submitting reports of their activities.

Consolidating the received data and presenting it in an individualized format for each client was a complicated and meticulous task. Automation reduced the risk of manual errors and improved statement preparation efficiency, plus provided the opportunity to increase scalability and improve service levels.

The project focused on automating cover-to-cover financial statements, including schedule of investments, statement of assets and liabilities, statement of operations, statement of changes, statement of cash flows and notes to financial statements. These statements were prepared pursuant to various bases of generally accepted accounting principles in order to efficiently and effectively use the available resources.

The Sprinterra team used a third-party proprietary instrument for creation and adjustments of automated templates. Data warehouse (DWH) technology was used to store the structured data.

Sprinterra developed automated reports to handle data from a large number of independent mutual funds coming from various data sources. The automation of complex reporting processes resulted in the elimination of the most time-consuming, manual tasks and gave users a flexible, easy-to-maintain reporting platform.

Users could obtain financial statements and proofs via a web-based interface that was also included in the reporting platform.

Technical Approach

The base step in creating a report template is preparing the necessary financial data that can be received after multi-stage data transformation. Data from different information, trading and accounting systems is gathered in one place using a standardized approach for its processing, which allows its use in a final report according to legislative requirements and client specifics.

The process of data transformation using the reporting platform is as follows:

Necessary data from several accounting systems is uploaded to the “drop site” in the form of .csv export files. The reporting system uploads and unifies all data into its DWH, preparing it for use in final reports. Business users can also add some missing data or adjust some uploaded data using special functions on the web service. For creation of final reports, only data from DWH is used.

The next step is the creation of report templates, which consists of two main parts: report samples analysis and template development. The first part includes analysis of the existing presentation of required reports. This helps in determining the final amount of required template variations and finding possible unification approaches across different accounting systems, which in turn helps to reduce efforts in report development.

Report templates on the reporting platform are developed using a special report designer tool and include a template markup setting in the form of internal scripting language. Specific “cross table functionality” is also used in the template development process. This useful mechanism separates report logic from data and presentation–shortening the implementation period of newly-issued legislative requirements and spreading best practices across locations and report preparation teams.

After all report data and templates are ready, the user can get a final report using either web service functionality or the report designer tool. The user defines specific client, fund and date parameters for each report template to get the final result for the specific parameter combination.