February 2022
Solution Spotlight: Workday Planning - Make Better Decisions Faster
ERP Tip of the Month: How to Help Make Your ERP Audit Proof
Meet the Team: Kendra Anderson, Operations Manager
Workday Planning: Making Better Decisions Faster
Workday Planning is a cloud-based software platform which provides budgeting, forecasting, planning, and reporting designed to help organizations make better decisions faster.
With Workday Planning, organizations can collaboratively plan across the enterprise without manual spreadsheets or clunky legacy system reporting. Everyone in an organization can be engaged, contribute, and leverage planning, analysis, and reporting to make better and more informed decisions. That’s why the Workday Planning platform makes planning easy and accessible via desktops, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office. With Workday Planning, models can be created for virtually any kind of functional use. Model and plan at the workgroup level, then combine those plans into a comprehensive, holistic model of the enterprise.
Highlighted Features:
Open Platform — The platform integrates with most enterprise systems, no matter what they are. Leverage the automated data integration or utilize a custom integration framework provided by Workday.
Secure — Threats are persistent and evolving—and so are the many safeguards to protect and secure platform data. Robust application security, comprehensive auditing, and encryption help ensure safe storage and access.
Fast — Patent-pending Elastic Hypercube Technology is the in-memory engine that delivers power, speed and performance — and the flexibility to easily model.
Meridian Partners is a Workday Planning Partner and can help you stay ahead of the competition by making better decisions faster. Contact us today to learn how.
How to Help Make Your ERP Audit-Proof
Audits are a regular part of protecting and ensuring the business integrity of most organizations. Complying with an audit and staying on the right side of regulatory statutes, and requirements can be stressful. It can keep C-Level Leaders, and Senior Managers up at night and take people away from their regular job duties to run reports and provide information for the auditing team. Worst yet, a bad audit can set off a chain of actions undermine investor or taxpayer confidence and even have serious have legal implications.
Most mid-sized to large public and commercial organizations maintain and keep financial records in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. These systems are often designed to help maintain systems and business records in accordance with industry best practices. However, to be effective in staying compliant the ERP needs to be set up, updated and maintained properly.
There are many types of audits. The most common include:
Regulatory and Best Practices Compliance
Process
Security
As part of a Security audit, a review is ERP Access Controls is often completed.
ERP Access Controls more easily help manage, control, and report who has system access, to what data, what parts of the system, and logs their system activities. These controls are designed to help prevent and identify access and authorization risks, prevent fraud, and to make it easier manage and report compliance.
ERP Access Controls tools often need to be set up and customized based on and individual organizations internal and industry best practices for maximum benefit. Once integrated they significantly help reduces the time required to monitor, detect, remediate, and approve access across the ERP landscape. Managing access approval is an important tenant of Segregation of Duties (SoD). The goal of the SoD is to minimize the possibility of unauthorized access which can lead to fraud and errors.
The AICPA has a great summary of what SoD is:
"Segregation of Duties (SoD) is a basic building block of sustainable risk management and internal controls for a business. The principle of SoD is based on shared responsibilities of a key process that disperses the critical functions of that process to more than one person or department."
In simple terms in an organization, you would not want the same person setting up a new vendor, to also be the person and approving invoices, and unchecked payments to that vendor. That would be a huge “red flag” issue on an audit. An ERP that is updated, well maintained, and leverages the latest compliance controls can help automatically avoid “red flag” audit issues.
To ensure you pass and audit with flying colors, ensure your ERP is optimized and leveraging the best of what your ERP software has to offer for Access Control Monitoring and Management.
Meridian Partners has two decades of experience helping customers set up and maintain their ERP to ensure it meets and exceeds all recommended Governance, Risk, and Compliance standards and best practices. We have helped protect some of best-known public and commercial organizations in the world.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you and your next audit go off without a hitch.
Each month, we highlight a key team member making a difference for our customers. This month, we would like to recognize Kendra Anderson, Operations Manager.
As the Operations Manager for the past 9 years, Kendra’s responsibilities include Human Resources, Recruiting, Benefits, Payroll, Accounts Payable, Contracting, Certifications and Proposal Submission. Kendra oversees onboarding new employees – taking them from candidate to employee orientation. She creates and modifies contracts for all new vendors and subcontractors, ensuring that contractual obligations are fulfilled. Kendra is responsible for ensuring that all of Meridian’s third-party certifications remain active and applies for new certifications when appropriate. Kendra is an integral part of submitting proposals, ensuring that they are professionally prepared and delivered on time. She is responsible for maintaining Meridian’s online repository of project service agreements, contracts and statements of work as well as setting up all projects correctly for time tracking. On a monthly basis, Kendra ensures that all vendors have submitted invoices and resolves any inaccuracies. Kendra is also responsible for handling invoicing for Meridian’s government contracts.
Prior to joining Meridian, Kendra had 15+ years of experience leading teams through the design, development and rollout of custom software solutions. Her industry experience is mainly with healthcare and financial institutions.
When not at Meridian, Kendra can be found watching her children ride horses, play soccer and dance. She is actively involved in the County Council of PTAs as the Treasurer. An animal lover, she fosters dogs and is an advocate for pet humanity. She and her husband spent much of COVID turning their Virginia yard into a nativescape.
Meridian Partners is a minority owned company and SBA-certified 8(a) leader in providing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Intelligence, and Budgeting solutions. Meridian helps organizations maximize business processes to be more agile, efficient, and transparent through the optimization of their enterprise systems.