Watch an eight-minute product demo video about EVI Query Engine.

WHITE PAPER:
Accelerating Revenue Recognition with Enterprise Value Integration (EVI)

Abstract

Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB and IASB) established ASC 606 and all companies will need to comply by 2019. This rule provides principles and mandates for organizations to recognize revenue from customers when a performance obligation stage is complete. In other words, which product or service is delivered in more than one step, revenue must be booked. This is causing panic among many organizations with complicated systems and contracts that were not written to reveal the value of each deliverable.

There are sixteen other vendors that have either produced a new module or have added new compliance features in their enterprise software to solve the problem. More often than not, they add complexity to organizations already dealing with multiple sub-systems. Enterprise Value Integration (EVI) is the only approach that offers a search engine to help people find information in the systems they already have.

This allows financial professionals to search for information contained in many different systems within a corporate network. They are able to see information that might be relevant, presented and ranked by a Recommendation Engine (RE). If there are multiple options, an accountant can find search the source record to determine which result is most relevant, then rank it “likely” or “possible.” The user can find the contract, contractual obligations, transactions and initiate reconciliation from one search engine, then save the results to a profile of each customer. This integrates back to the sub-system in which each piece of datum is found. EVI Query Engine reduces days of searching and reconciliation to less than an hour per contractual obligation.

The more users work with EVI Query Engine, the smarter it becomes. It uses machine learning (ML) to improve results. ML and RE are both forms of artificial intelligence (AI). In this case, they are not used to replace any members of the accounting team, but to accelerate productivity.

It also lays the groundwork for running financial simulations to identify opportunities for organizational improvements with EVI methods. The simulations take information about the output of business processes that were used to satisfy each contractual obligation. We tap into either real cost accounting data from each expense or from the consensus of analysts around each business process. The simulations consider two variables: Shareholder Value and Customer Value. The output can have a billion or more outcomes, and the only question is whether it is worth additional investment to implement EVI in full or make precise surgical changes with the greatest impact.

WHITE PAPER CONTENTS

PROBLEMS CREATED BY ASC 606 REQUIREMENTS
• Contracts
• Philosophical Differences
• Business Processes
• Disparate Information Systems

RECOGNITION + RECONCILIATION
• Step One: Mapping
• Step Two: Integration
• Step Three: Data Mining
• Step Four: AI + Recommendation Engine
• Step Five: Confirmation or Correction

• Step Six: Machine Learning

HISTORY OF PROCESSES + SERVICES
• Client-Server Model > Document-style
• Fewer Endpoints with Web Services > Many Endpoints with MSA
• Hundreds of Backends > Thousands of Backends
• DMZs > Handshakes
• Enterprise Service Bus > MSA Patterns

(DOWNLOAD PDF)

BUILDING A WEB SERVICE INVENTORY
• Service Registration
• Service Discovery
• Log Files

TOOLS + TECHNOLOGIES IN SERVICE DISCOVERY
• Docker & Kubernetes
• Smart Stack
• Mesos
• Zookeeper
• ETCD, Consul, and More
• OpenStack

TRANSITIONING TO CONTAINERS + CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL DATA SUPPLY CHAINS
• Workday and Docker
• Registrator Project
• ContainerPilot