Finance and Accounting BPO Services Overview

Most chief financial officers we work and speak with share a common goal, one both simple and profound: to create a world-class finance organization. CFOs seek to build and manage a finance function that is both efficient and effective—one that has the process rigor and control to keep costs in line, as well as the business savvy to help their companies achieve high performance in a challenging, economic climate.

For today's multinational companies looking to achieve high performance through an effective and efficient finance organization, Accenture Finance and Accounting BPO Services can help.

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Accenture draws its strength from extensive experience, research-based knowledge and the skills of thousands of professionals across our Global Delivery Network. We have:

• Eighteen years' operational experience in finance and accounting business process outsourcing.
  
  
• More than 8,500 professionals serving over 60 customer contracts for more than 50 clients.
  
  
• The capability to provide finance and accounting business process outsourcing services to client operations in more than 150 countries in 38 languages.
  
  
• A mature and proven business:
  • We have renewed 17 contracts—five of them more than once.
  • Twelve of our current contracts have been running for six years or longer.

Accenture has a demonstrated ability and track record of delivering high performance through measurable improvements in business performance through finance and accounting BPO. Here are some examples:

Procure to Pay

• Improvements in procure-to-pay process enabled early payment discount savings of more than $10 million for a technology company in its last financial year.
  
  
• Thirty percent improvement in invoices paid on time enabled early payment discounts for a global electronics company.
  
  
• Backlog of supplier invoices on hold reduced by more than 75 percent for a construction company.
  
  
• Problem invoices reduced by 88 percent, unpaid invoices older than 30 days reduced by 85 percent and the average time needed to resolve problem invoices shortened from 52 days to 24 for a division of an energy company.
  
  
• Deploying Accenture Profit Recovery an Analytics capabilities as part of a BPO program prevented almost $3 million in duplicate and erroneous payments in its first eight months of operation for a pharmaceutical company and more than $2 million for an energy company.
  
  
• Standardized processes, reduced costs and increased efficiency for a European airline—150 percent scope increase for procure-to-pay process across multiple countries, required just a 15 percent FTE increase and no transition activities.
  
  
• Increased pay-on-time performance from 45 percent to more than 75 percent for a chemicals company, and delivered productivity gain of more than 20 percent within three months of new workflow implementation.
  
  
• Aged items reduced by 78 percent for the European operations of a pharmaceutical company on sub-ledger and suspense accounts since 2007.

Record to Report

• Improved control environment—100 percent balance sheet reconciliations every accounting period for a logistics company.
  
  
• Accelerated monthly close from 11 to six days for global energy company.
  
  
• Completed reconciliations on time at 99.9 percent for a global electronics company. And implemented a reconciliation tool that decreased the time required for multiple source reconciliations by more than 85 percent.
  
  
• Improvements since outsourcing in aged items less than 60 days compared to total (2005 to end 2008): Inventory and revenue accounting (37 to 98 percent); inter-company (48 to 92 percent) and general ledger (43 to 91 percent).

Order to Cash

• 47 percent DSO reduction over four years freeing up approximately $1 billion of working capital for a global telecoms company.
  
  
• DSO reduced by 30 percent for a global logistics company freeing up approximately $500 million of working capital.
  
  
• Improved DSO by 19 days (2007 vs. 2008) for a global electronics company freeing up approximately $180 million of working capital.
  
  
• A major contribution to a telecoms client’s best DSO performance (47 days from an average of more than 58).
  
  
• Absorbed 65 percent growth in the ledger with existing headcount and no deterioration in performance for a technology company.
  
  
• Targeted projects achieved a 37 percent reduction in aged debt for an insurance company.
  
  
• Long-term program of reducing bad debt at a global electronics company.
  • Reduced client bad debt expense by over $1.3 million (42 percent) in 2004.
  • Reduced bad debt reserve by $5 million (30 percent) over two years, increasing net income by nearly $2 million in 2006 and 2007.
  • Reduced reserve for bad debt and recovered write-offs resulting in an increase in net income of $800,000 in 2008.
    
    
• Reduced the Central European sales order cycle time for a document management company from 13 days to five—a 62 percent reduction.

Operating cost reductions

• 50 percent for BT
• 40 percent for DHL Exel
• More than 45 percent for BP
• 35 percent for Rhodia

Examples of our award-winning client relationships include:

• Microsoft and Accenture: Winners of 2008 Outsourcing Excellence Award for Most Strategic relationship.
• Thomas Cook and Accenture: Winners of the 2007 Outsourcing Excellence Award for the Best European Union deal.

Our capabilities span a full suite of finance and accounting BPO services covering the entire finance value chain.

Core services include:

• Procure to pay
  • Transaction processing—including accounts payable and travel and expense processing.
  • Financial integrity—including vendor statement reconciliations, interface management and payment accuracy controls.
  • Help desk—vendor self help portals.

• Order to cash
  • Collections and accounts receivable—including managing and processing collections, maintaining ledger and applying cash.
  • Order management and billing—including managing contracts and sales orders, and customer requests and inquiries.
  • Order-to-cash analytics—including authorizing and managing credit and revenue assurance activities.
• Record to report
  • Asset and transactional processing—including fixed assets, intercompany accounting and cash management and banking.
  • Period close and data integrity—including master data maintenance, account reconciliation and analysis.
  • Financial and government reporting—financial, tax, management and regulatory reporting.

Retained finance services include:

• Finance strategy and organization design, finance skills and competency and finance change management.