Real World Use Cases

Overview

Since its availability in 2012, Interject has solved a wide variety of problems for small and enterprise-sized companies. Below are excerpts of use cases that can provide more detailed views of what Interject can do. Each use case is supported by personal references, which can be provided on request.

High-Speed General Ledger Access

Most accounting departments use the general ledger trial balance and journal entry listing reports. Accounts payable detail ledgers are also common. A large national organization, which often takes several minutes to access these frequently used data, rely on Interject to achieve access times of approximately 20 seconds. With typical report generations exceeding 15,000 every month, Interject helped them recover 7,920 productive hours per year. Estimating a low end labor cost of $30 per hour, that's approximately $240,000 in saved wages. What reports does your organization access all the time, and how much time are you spending to access them?

Consolidated Financials With Accountability

Useful, consolidated financial reporting is no longer an advanced feature of Enterprise Resource Planning, but a basic aspect of software. The next must-have feature is now providing collaboration and explanations around monthly and quarterly variance analysis. Interject has provided consolidated financial reporting within MS Excel that not only report on data and variances, but are interactive as well. Interject reports can accept the stories behind the variances so they can reach the executives that steer the company's performance. The largest client for this use case has over 250 locations across the USA with revenue exceeding 2.5B per year. Interject is used for monthly actuals variance analysis, monthly projections to prior projection analysis and for annual budget reviews.

Financial Reporting Tools for Microsoft Excel

Interject provides a suite of tools to report financial and operational data right inside MS Excel. It is secure, fast, and lets end users operate Excel as they normally would to further refine and augment reports. Data can be reported in a specific lists or columns (Data Lists), or in a special "query-anything-and-put-anywhere" approach (Data Cells) that can be as effective as a pivot table with less formatting restrictions. The largest client uses Interject reporting exclusively to support all SEC 10K and 10Q reporting. All of their locations leverage the Interject report engine, which totals approximately 1,200,000 report queries per year with limited hardware required.

Collecting Fixed Asset Data Without Sending Spreadsheets

Keeping track of fixed assets throughout a large enterprise can involve many emailed spreadsheets and consolidating the responses. This can take hours of detailed work. Interject reports are currently used to both distribute fixed asset data to managers and receive information on the status of the assets. Inputs from managers may note if an asset is retired or scrapped, could contain suggestions for correcting fixed asset data, and also may indicate when an annual fixed asset review is completed. This use case is an excellent example of how much can be done when a report within Excel allows for user inputs. With Interject , managers are only allowed to see assets for their own locations which keeps it all very simple.

Adding Visibility and Collaboration to the Financial Close

The financial close that occurs each month for every organization is normally a whirlwind of tight deadlines packed in the first 7 days of the next month. For large organizations, the close process is highly organized, since it involves hundreds of tasks and people. What is typically missing in today's financial solutions are means to collaborate on the status of tasks and to share visibility of progress. It is also important that certain tasks, such as reconciliations or journal entries, are tracked in real-time with the ability for supervisors to sign off on certain steps. Reconciliations can also can become outdated as entries hit the books later in the close and should be rechecked. Interject has provided these 'Close Management' features for the last two years with an approach that is light and nimble for an organization to use.

The Close Management features have grown recently to handle full Journal Entry controls and integration into an outside ERP. This greatly reduces journal entry errors, rework, and time spent handling journal entries throughout a large enterprise.

Balance Sheet Reconciliation Management

Visibility to balance sheet reconciliations can be a challenge, since most reconciliations are created and maintained in spreadsheet files. Interject has provided a way to retain reconciliations in spreadsheets, but they are fully tracked where the files are saved in the network. Interject may be considered the best of both worlds for some organizations that want to keep reconciliations in spreadsheets while having enterprise features and controls around them. These features can include the visibility to see which reconciliations are completed, which are signed off by appropriate personnel, which have direct access to the files wherever they are saved on the network, and which can verify that reconciliations are still valid compared to the current general ledger. Preparing for future audits has never been easier and more controlled.

Financial Planning: Budgeting and Forecasting

Since the beginning, Interject has provided annual budgeting and monthly forecasting features through a web integrated Excel interface. It has been used by a large, public, solid waste company for all annual budgeting, monthly forecasting, budget version tracking for the board of directors, and planning collaboration across locations. Over 250 locations utilize the solution every month, which feeds into consolidated, interactive financial reports that help upper management influence the organization's performance. The depth of the budgeting and projection system demonstrates the long budget and forecasting management experience Interject team possesses, as well as their passion to ensure users work efficiently.

Raising the Bar for Journal Entries

Although many ERP systems provide a means to manage and create new journal entries, most journal entries start in a spreadsheet file. These journal entry files are then imported into the ERP system using the procedures prescribed by the ERP software. There are four typical challenges in this area: 1) pushing the JE into the ERP can take minutes instead of seconds; 2) JE's are not adequately validated to ensure errors do not get into the G/L, and this creates rework; 3) the source of the JE data and approvals are not easy to track; and 4) there are limited options to preview the journal entry's impact on financials before having to upload them into the ERP.

Interject provides a Journal Entry Control process that can be integrated into an ERP to shave significant time off of monthly close processes, provide better visibility for management, and provide traceability for audits. It is currently used in an organization that has over 300,000 journal entries per year and is considered one of the most powerful solutions that has been provided by the corporate office.

Adding Change Visibility to Operational Data

It is commonly accepted that billing systems, like those in medical and dental offices, will change over time as payments are applied and transactions are adjusted. Changes and deletions to previous month's records, as well as updates to patient and insurance carriers, are not easily tracked in a monthly close where prior period changes are not captured in current reports. This creates complications. Interject supplied a solution for a regional dental company by providing a reporting database that serves as a control door for all prior period changes, including those related to categorization of revenue from carrier and patient record changes. It provides a solid foundation for improved financial trending, for performance metric analysis, and for provider compensation calculations. Interject has industry experience in both medical and dental reporting, especially in areas of accounting and provider compensation.

Secure Delivery of Payroll Check Registers

Distributing payroll registers can sometimes be cumbersome for large enterprises with many locations. In many cases, corporate personnel will access the entire register and split it up into smaller reports to send to each location manager. Although this can be inefficient, the real risk is emailing the wrong confidential payroll register to the wrong manager. Interject was able to cleanly resolve both issues with a large Ceridian payroll implementation. Now, they download and import a single master register to a highly secure database. This occurs along with the security setup tables from the payroll software. Using the security data, Interject provides a single place where all managers can pull only their payroll registers on demand, and this is done directly from their spreadsheet reports. Several drill down reports give several views of the register quickly. Now, hundreds of hours are saved each week, risk is significantly mitigated, and the end users have more data then they imagined, all with a keystroke.

Collaborate on Cloud Data

Cloud based ERPs are growing in popularity and will continue to do so in the next 10 years. Web-based reporting, however, still presents challenges that reduce the efficiency and flexibility users require. Interject provides interactive reporting within MS Excel on a Force.com platform-based ERP called Financial Force. Collections staff can quickly make notes on invoices and customer accounts within their analysis reports, and the whole team can view this information. Furthermore, complete financial Board of Directors packets can be crafted in Excel and updated for the next month with just a few clicks. The options are limitless with Interject technology. Now, both on-premise data and cloud data are under your control.