Today, more than ever, that means a finance organization that is both efficient and effective—that has consistent processes, uniform technology and a strong control environment to help achieve high performance in a challenging, global marketplace.

Accenture Finance and Accounting BPO Services can help today's multinational companies looking to achieve high performance through an effective and efficient finance organization. In today’s economy, we can help these companies to look ahead and determine how to do more with less, as well as see opportunities and seize them, to be in a strong competitive position as the economy recovers.

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.

With more than 18 years of experience and a substantial market share, Accenture is a market leader in finance and accounting outsourcing. We pioneered the first major finance outsourcing deal in 1991, and we have been acknowledged by industry analysts ever since as a market leader.

Today, Accenture has an established portfolio of more than 80 finance outsourcing contracts for some 70 clients across all industries. These clients are served by more than 9,000 skilled professionals in our global delivery network.

Our mature organization is evidenced by clients who return to us again and again. We have renewed 18 of our current contracts—five of them more than once, and 12 of our current contracts have been running for six years or longer. In the last few years we have celebrated finance and accounting BPO partnerships of 15 years with BP and 10 years with DHL Exel.

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.
  
  
• 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.

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 over the course of a year for a global electronics company freeing up approximately $180 million of working capital.
  
  
• 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 the first year of outsourcing.
    
    
  • Reduced bad debt reserve by $5 million (30 percent) over two years, increasing net income by nearly $2 million in each year.
    
    
  • Reduced reserve for bad debt and recovered write-offs resulting in an increase in net income of $800,000 in the following year.

Operating cost reductions

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

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

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.

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