Trintech Speeds the Close and Boosts Morale with Planful

Trintech develops industry-leading solutions to automate account reconciliation and financial close processes. From high volume transaction matching, to automating and managing balance sheet reconciliations, intercompany accounting, journal entries, close management tasks, to governance, risk and compliance – Trintech’s portfolio of financial close solutions help manage all aspects of the reconciliation and financial close processes. Of course, Trintech still needs to manage its own financial performance management processes beyond the close, so it moved from a limited, ill-suited reporting tool to Planful to accelerate its close and subsequent planning and reporting processes.

Trintech is an award-winning cloud-based software company that automates reconciliation and financial close processes. Its solutions work for Fortune 100 companies as well as growing businesses, helping it grow over the past 35 years to serve more than 4,200 customers and 300,000 users.

Trintech’s software solution for financial close automation streamlines work, improves accuracy, and reduces risk so the Office of the CFO can better manage the detailed process of the financial close. It helps reduce transaction matching times by 70%, bank reconciliation times by 67%, and close cycle times by 60%. It’s also integrated with Planful to offer joint customers an end-to-end FP&A, consolidation, and accounting close processes in a smooth-flowing environment.

As a fast-growing company, Trintech doesn’t have the time to deal with slow, friction-filled financial processes. It obviously uses its own software to accelerate its own close process, but was hampered by an ill-suited financial reporting tool that added more friction while forcing its finance and accounting teams to constantly double-check the resulting data.

“We struggled with getting our reporting out accurately and timely,” said Josh Ezagui, Vice President of Finance at Trintech. “We (also) had to constantly recon our reporting because we couldn’t trust the numbers on one report versus another because of the way the data was being pulled (by the reporting tool).”

Trintech’s previous reporting tool lacked flexibility and didn’t allow Finance to easily make changes, adjust to new processes, or adapt to shifting economic conditions, which made it difficult for Trintech to scale its finance and accounting capabilities. Trintech also wanted to modernize how the Office of the CFO reported financial information and collaborated with the business to guide decisions. Dashboarding, intuitive but advanced analytics, easy-to-use what-if analysis, and financial planning were just a few of the capabilities the company desired as it looked for a new and comprehensive financial performance management solution.

“We started looking at a multitude of tools and just determined that, from the user interface, and Finance owning the process and the product, Planful just rose up to the top as the right tool for Trintech,” Josh explained.

As Trintech continues to grow and expand around the world, the pressure on its finance and accounting teams grows as well. But, with Trintech and Planful, teams can continue to support that growth without working nights and weekends or adding headcount. Beyond just the cost avoidance, it’s a boon for the people guiding the company’s financial performance.

“One of the great things about Planful has really been from a morale perspective,” Josh said. “There’ve been plenty of times in my career where it’s three o’clock in the morning and you’re pushing to get reports out. That kills morale. When you look at somebody and say, ‘You’re not going to go to your kid’s baseball game,’ you’re going to lose people. The great thing about Planful is it saves time, and I can give the majority of that time back to my people. That has had a tremendous impact on the team.”

Being a finance-owned platform, Planful also gives Trintech the speed and versatility to adjust and grow its financial performance management capabilities without relying on IT or external consultants to make changes to its hierarchy.

“Planful is very easy,” added Josh. “I can add a business unit, add a department, add any of the dimensions I need and all my reporting is updated automatically.”

Trintech, like most companies, relies on spreadsheets for fast ad hoc analysis and simple reporting. It’s a tool that will likely never wane in popularity for the Office of the CFO. But spreadsheets lack the required rigor, versioning, collaboration, intelligent error-checking, security, persistent storage, and everything else built into today’s cloud solutions. For even the smallest of organizations, spreadsheets are a risk not worth taking, especially for critical financial performance management processes.

Planful Spotlight for Microsoft Office helps Trintech plan, present, and report financial data using the ubiquitous spreadsheet to seamlessly build reports directly in Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, and have data updated dynamically from Planful’s single source of truth.

“We use Excel in finance and accounting (and) we’re going to use it for the long term because it’s a powerful, good tool,” Josh said. “But Spotlight has been a game-changer for my team for getting data into Excel so we can use it in different ways.”

With Planful, Trintech has gained a close and consolidation, planning, and financial analysis solution, and a strategic partner to offer joint customers an integrated end-to-end finance and accounting solution.

“The great thing about the partnership with Trintech and Planful is simply that it gives everybody one tool to close the books,” said Josh. “Whether it’s matching or reconciliations, pulling in multiple ERPs, keeping track and documenting the controls and the processes that auditors are concerned about, we’re really speeding up that process so that, when the data is feeding into Plantful, it’s clean, easily accessible, and lowers the amount of time to close the books and get the reporting out.”