Study Shows Dramatic Advantages by Automating and Unifying SOX, Account Reconciliation and Financial Close Activities

Business Wire, Oct 4, 2006

Robert Frances Group Report Highlights Efficiency Gains, Reduced Audit Fees and ROI Associated with Automating Office of Finance Processes

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Movaris, the software company that automates and unifies account reconciliations, SOX compliance, financial close and financial reporting processes, today announced the availability of New Strategies to Create Significant ROI in the Office of Finance, a study published by Robert Frances Group. The study examines how finance departments can contribute new ROI to their company by increasing efficiency while meeting compliance mandates.

Today's finance departments are increasingly challenged as regulatory pressures increase and deadlines and sanctions tighten. Manual processes predominate but often promote errors and leave finance staff overburdened with repetitive tasks. Traditional legacy data systems are not well suited to handle compliance processes and workflow and often lack key analytic capabilities. Just as their colleagues in manufacturing, sales, and support have benefited from process and automation improvements over the last few years, finance executives are now looking for solutions to automate their own manual processes.

"Technologies that automate and unify account reconciliation, SOX 404 compliance, and financial close processes must be viewed as essential components of sustainable compliance," stated John Van Decker, senior vice president and principal research fellow, Robert Frances Group. "Through automation, corporations can generate an annual ROI of between $200,000 to $1 million from efficiency gains, reduce audit fees by at least 10 percent and decrease the time spent on routine tasks by more than 20 percent. With these savings, finance will be well positioned to play an increasingly strategic role within the organization."

The study reports that by automating compliance and related financial management processes, and addressing the close activities, companies can lower risk of error, gain visibility to ensure accuracy in financial reporting and decrease the effort necessary for regulatory compliance.

"Robert Frances Group spoke with auditors and compliance service providers and found that enterprises are paying between $1 million and $3 million per billion dollars of revenue for compliance consulting services," said Eric Keller, Movaris CEO. "Companies need to focus on finding a long-term solution that improves business performance, reduces the ongoing cost and time of the close process and breaks the cycle of risk of material weakness disclosures and restatements. It comes down to automating the 'last mile' of finance - the series of interdependent tasks that a finance organization must perform on a quarterly basis to produce the data and disclosures for internal and external financial reports."

"Unifying the account reconciliation and SOX compliance processes with the close process provides unprecedented visibility into potential problems. It also assures that the data used in the close process is accurate," Van Decker added.

According to the report, finance executives should consider solutions such as Movaris OneClose to automate and manage the manual, labor-intensive processes that make up the 'last mile' of finance - account reconciliations, compliance, and financial close. To download this whitepaper, go to www.movaris.com or for more information call 888-800-7545.

About Movaris

Movaris helps finance organizations transform their 'last mile' - the series of manual tasks performed during account reconciliations, SOX compliance, and financial close - into a repeatable and efficient process. Movaris OneClose is the industry's only application suite that automates and unifies these processes with a company's financial statements, creating an auditable, transparent system of record. Movaris OneClose customers realize: more analysis time by automating routine workflows, reduced audit fees from auto-generated evidence binders and increased accuracy of financial reports by reconciling, unifying, and standardizing processes throughout a company's global finance organization. Movaris is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. For more information, please visit www.movaris.com or call 888-800-7545.

Movaris is a registered trademark of Movaris Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.