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Marie
Cox, Vice President/Controller at NewportFed |
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A banker
might safely assume that doubling assets in a mere four years would justify an
increase in accounting staff. Not at NewportFed, a $345M savings bank located in
Newport, Rhode Island where the accounting department actually shrank by 25%
thanks to Oracle Financials from COCC.
“Our
bank adopted a holding company structure, went public, acquired another
institution and expanded its product line,” said Marie Cox, Vice President and
Controller at NewportFed. “Yet Oracle Financials enabled us to dramatically
reduce the labor involved in our accounting procedures. For example, we reduced
our month end closing procedures from two full days to just half a day. That
level of labor reduction has been our experience every step of the way.”
COCC, a
data processing service located in Avon, Connecticut, has offered a complete
Financial Suite, which includes the Oracle Financial applications, as part of
its information technology services to banks and credit unions since 2001. The
company is the largest provider of Oracle Financial applications in the world
outside of Oracle Corporation itself.
The
Oracle Financials package utilized by NewportFed provides state-of-the-art
General Ledger, Fixed Assets and Accounts Payable modules directly accessible
via Excel. “There are no uploads or downloads with this system,” said Linda
Stahl, Director – Strategic Products at COCC. “Bank accountants use Excel to
review and update their financial information in Oracle.”
The use
of Excel to access accounting functions is a major step forward. Most
accountants consider Excel to be their “home” software, using it to perform
financial analysis, chart the results, and produce finished reports for
management and the board. |
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COCC’s
Excel-Oracle connection, called Application Desktop Integrator, enables bankers
to use the software they know best to gain access to enterprise-wide financial
information.
Ms. Cox
said that the bank’s custom reports produced in Oracle Financials are
automatically available in Excel without downloading or waiting. “The
information is just there,” she said. “This has enabled us to match our
financials with our daily activity so we can reconcile in record time.”
The
process works in reverse as well, when accruals and amortization figures need to
be entered into the Oracle Financials system at month-end. “One of our reports
automatically compares the current month against the last, identifying variances
and producing the appropriate entries for review and posting,” said Ms. Cox.
“It’s a tremendous time-saver.”
NewportFed saves additional time by comparing totals from the bank’s loan and
deposit portfolios to the figures hitting the general ledger. “This feature lets
us reconcile the bank and holding company within minutes each day rather than
one hour each day,” said Ms. Cox.
The bank
also uses Oracle Financials to deliver relevant financial reports to each
department. Ms. Cox’s staff schedules the reports for production and delivery
every morning, ensuring that every department automatically has the financial
information it needs.
“The
system gives us plenty of room to grow,” said Ms. Cox. “Oracle Financials was
designed for complex, multi-national companies, so it handles every one of our
business expansions with ease. I can honestly say it is very unlikely that we
will ever outgrow Oracle Financials.” |
