Initially, the assignment was to create processes for payroll tasks, performed by an employee who was part of the reorganization. It quickly evolved to a lot of operational tasks take over: Payroll, Interco, purchase price variance, Receivables invoicing, and other Financial MEC tasks such as accruals follow-up and most important one, reporting to the Corporate.
Along with these tasks, we had the opportunity to take part in a payroll project.
The final assignment is to help the Financial department to ensure the transition of the reorganization.
Pharmaceutical
Finance Swiss-knife in accounting transformation project
The situation
The task
At first, liaise with the payroll employee to understand and write down all his tasks to create comprehensive processes that might help anyone to perform it in case of illness or holidays...
Then, we took part in the daily reconciliation of ICO transactions of all entities, and MEC activities. Basically, we extract each week a status if all ICO balances between our entity and all others and we chase them to get our invoices booked or corrected due to wrong booking (on their side or ours), confirm payment processing...
Another part of the assignment is related to PPV, each 2-3 days we get an extract of all PPV impacts and we analyse all impacts above a defined threshold. We report to the procurement manager all these impacts, who contact the Business and give necessary information to take proper actions to correct or eliminate the impacts, and finally present a global monthly report to all finance partners.
Receivable invoicing is depending on the business requests. Each time an invoice or credit note is requested, we receive information from the business and thanks to an excel template or directly in the ERP, we issue the document.
MEC tasks are various, most of these tasks are related to accruals and cut-off follow-up.
The main MEC task is the reporting to the Corporate, which is quite challenging, as the tool used to report is very user-unfriendly.
Basically, we download the data from our ERP that we upload in the reporting tool. From there starts all the “problems” as the upload generates lots of blocking errors preventing us to publish the data. All these errors must be corrected first, but it’s not always easy or straightforward to correct. In addition to these corrections, we also might receive additional corrections to book on both sides (ERP + Reporting tool) which brings even more work to be done before the submission deadline.
The payroll project was based on the analysis of all the financial impacts of accruals and how to ensure we take them back correctly when costs are really received (invoice booking).
The transition of the tasks related to reorganization is to train the people from the HUB, to perform all the tasks related to their department. This is quite a long process as we need to connect and make this handover during several months, with several levels of handover. All trainings are made via teams which can be exhausting sometimes. It’s a great experience anyway.
Then, we took part in the daily reconciliation of ICO transactions of all entities, and MEC activities. Basically, we extract each week a status if all ICO balances between our entity and all others and we chase them to get our invoices booked or corrected due to wrong booking (on their side or ours), confirm payment processing...
Another part of the assignment is related to PPV, each 2-3 days we get an extract of all PPV impacts and we analyse all impacts above a defined threshold. We report to the procurement manager all these impacts, who contact the Business and give necessary information to take proper actions to correct or eliminate the impacts, and finally present a global monthly report to all finance partners.
Receivable invoicing is depending on the business requests. Each time an invoice or credit note is requested, we receive information from the business and thanks to an excel template or directly in the ERP, we issue the document.
MEC tasks are various, most of these tasks are related to accruals and cut-off follow-up.
The main MEC task is the reporting to the Corporate, which is quite challenging, as the tool used to report is very user-unfriendly.
Basically, we download the data from our ERP that we upload in the reporting tool. From there starts all the “problems” as the upload generates lots of blocking errors preventing us to publish the data. All these errors must be corrected first, but it’s not always easy or straightforward to correct. In addition to these corrections, we also might receive additional corrections to book on both sides (ERP + Reporting tool) which brings even more work to be done before the submission deadline.
The payroll project was based on the analysis of all the financial impacts of accruals and how to ensure we take them back correctly when costs are really received (invoice booking).
The transition of the tasks related to reorganization is to train the people from the HUB, to perform all the tasks related to their department. This is quite a long process as we need to connect and make this handover during several months, with several levels of handover. All trainings are made via teams which can be exhausting sometimes. It’s a great experience anyway.
The action
Lots of communication, resilience and assertiveness were needed:
- We tried to always be proactive to really retrieve the pression from the shoulder of employees concerned by the reorganisation and their manager
- We ensured that each employee can feel comfortable, knowing that everything was performed correctly and with all the best results possible
The results
- The greater accomplishment in this mission was the feedback received from managers and KT receivers, which was laudatory
- At first, we took over all the tasks requested without any problems and ensure a good transition, allowing employees moving in the company, to focus on their new role
- Secondly, we succeeded in training the new people with accuracy as they have been able to take over the tasks the good way with good results when they moved to the live phase, that consisted in being fully responsible of the tasks performed
- Method used is to be always available and always giving as much information as possible, create accurate processes that avoid any questions or doubt on the task itself, even if questions are always welcome