Why is GL Connect Better Than Other 3rd Party Solutions?

Back in the summer of 1998, I earned my Accounting Degree and was also a professional musician. Accounting was my Plan B. What I really wanted to become was a jazz musician, that was Plan A. However, Plan A kept me in the streets playing until 3 in the morning, and during the holidays I would see the sun come out every day. It was exhausting and not a career I wanted for a future family. Hence, Plan B became my support. My mentality was to work at 8am and go home at 5pm. Goodbye, music! That was the plan at the time.

In the fall of 1999, I landed my first job at NCR Corporation. I immediately noticed that going home at 5pm was not well received by the team. Team members were leaving work anywhere from 9pm to 4am every day. The job requirements were not difficult. It was the manual processes coming out of an ERP system known as Oracle. All these manual processes consumed time, leaving us with not enough hours in the day.

What Made It So Manual?

Here’s how NCR was building Financial Statements from Oracle into Excel:

1. We would run a report (i.e., Trial Balance, AP, AR reports, etc.), and the output of reports was in TEXT. We needed to clean them up in Excel and add missing columns with formulas.
2. Formulas in Excel were prone to errors, and manual verification would take an extended period of time.
3. Once financials were fixed and numbers tied, analyzing the data was not difficult, but it was time consuming because of the inability to drill through the details. The report itself was static.
4. To overcome Step 3, we needed to repeat Steps 1 and 2.

The formula looked like this:
TEXT OUTPUT → INTO EXCEL → CLEAN → ADD FUNCTIONS → VERIFY = A lot of time that could be used in analysis and other important areas

Other time consuming areas worth mentioning:

• 5. If numbers changed, then we had to repeat Steps 1 through 4.
• 6. Manager sign-off and delivery to the Office of the CFO.

One could argue that using FSG (Financial Statement Generator) was the solution. At that time, FSG was only allowed if the Oracle user was given a General Ledger Super User responsibility. None existed in our department due to security concerns and segregation of duties. This was an NCR global policy. We did not have a local IT department. IT was at HQ, and their time was limited. Therefore, the mechanism was to produce financials ourselves manually. It was doable, but at the expense of time.

I don’t know why, but it was a bragging right at NCR that if you went home late, the perception was that you worked hard and got the job done no matter what. If the deadline was noon, and you had 2 days for something that should take 5, yet still delivered, it was a badge of honor. The collateral damage was your personal life and health.

I complained every time I couldn’t leave at 5pm. Back then, I thought it was NCR’s workload. Today, I realize it wasn’t NCR. It was Oracle that made reporting so difficult. Just because Oracle has FSGs or standard reports doesn’t mean they meet 100% of requirements. And if IT doesn’t produce what business users need, then it is up to business users to find workarounds. Workarounds are the killer of time.

Instead of complaining, I got out of accounting and joined SplashBI. Once inside, I was introduced to an army of IT folks who listened to my wild needs and produced a solution that eliminated the formula:

TEXT OUTPUT → INTO EXCEL → CLEAN → ADD FUNCTIONS → VERIFY

But How?

The solution had to be familiar and easy to use:

• It must work inside Excel
• It must connect to Oracle
• It must refresh all GL balances
• It must have drilldown capabilities

And then, GL Connect was born…

Why is GLC Better Than Other 3rd Party Solutions?

• Proven across a wide range of clients
• Scalable (greater than 27 million records per day)
• High performance (drill to 834K records in under 3 minutes)
• Flexible deployment options
• A single plugin and infrastructure for both Oracle EBS and Fusion Cloud

What Are Clients Saying About GL Connect?

• Month-end reduced by 2 day
• Self-service solution with less dependency on IT
• Drilldown is directly in Excel
• Variance explanation is simplified with drilldown
• Reconciliation done via one-click drill
• Reports are not static, one click refreshes all tabs in Excel

The old formula is still today a common workaround for thousands of Oracle users. But the fact that GL Connect reduces days from month-end and reporting week is a testimonial I personally take as a compliment. I can’t take back my hours of leaving work at 3am.
However, you could be leaving at 5pm, just like I imagined back in 1999.