The Zimco Group, South Africa`s leading provider of industrial materials, has recently implemented sophisticated financial consolidation and management reporting software to overcome a number of financial challenges.
"We have implemented Comshare FDC, to help us cope with multi-level reporting requirements, tight deadlines, the need for strong data security and differing year ends," says Trevor Anderson, group accountant, Zimco Industries. "These factors previously made financial reporting a complex operation for the Group."
FDC, from applications software integrator SPL, has increased the speed of data consolidation by at least 50%, eliminated the pain of year-end accounting, ensured more control and helped the Group to move further towards international accounting standards.
The Zimco Group, which produces and supplies zinc, lead, aluminium, chemicals and plastics, has an annual turnover in excess of R900 million. One of the Group`s challenges is that the year end of its major shareholder, Anglo American, is in March, while that of its other shareholder, UK-based Cookson plc, falls in December.
"This means we must produce two sets of financial accounts over differing periods," says Anderson. "We also have to work to tight deadlines. The shareholders require consolidated, audited accounts three to four weeks following year end.
"FDC enabled us to complete our first year end consolidation in less time than ever before - even though we had to devise new journal entries," he says. "The closing cycle took three days instead of seven. We learned how to use the systems quickly, and came through the first year end very successfully with excellent support from SPL," he says.
Having tackled the year end problem, Zimco is currently starting to use FDC for its monthly reporting, and is finding time-saving benefits in this area as well.
"A lot of planning had to go into this phase of the roll-out, which includes having to import inter-company sales data from Impact," explains Anderson. "In addition, we are introducing more control by insisting on monthly inter-company balances from all our operating companies. FDC ensures that once figures have been input and saved to FDC, they cannot be changed.
"The database is extremely user friendly," says Anderson. "Users can create additional reports in any way they wish."
"Comshare FDC is a financial consolidation application that collects actual, budget, and forecast data from remote subsidiaries," says Gavin Steinberg of SPL. "FDC delivers financial data and reports to the desktops of analysts, manager, and executives for ad hoc comparison reporting. For statutory reporting, FDC consolidates actuals from multiple general ledgers and multiple charts of accounts to produce consolidated results quickly.
"For management reporting, FDC allows users to view the data from many different perspectives - legal, geographic, operational, by product or product line, for example, providing management perspective that goes far beyond statutory requirements," he says.
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