Financial close.

Cartesis, a specialist in finance and performance management software, has brought out Cartesis Intercompany 5.0, which is designed to help large companies close their financial books faster and more accurately by easily reconciling intercompany transactions.

Cartesis Intercompany 5.0 optimizes peer-to-peer collaboration and approvals over the Web, securely tracking changes and providing an auditable trail for each transaction, the company said in an announcement. This solution allows business units to reconcile balances directly with one another all the way to invoice-level matching in real time. By shifting responsibility to business units, corporations remove the intercompany reconciliation process from the critical path of the fast close and reduce their closing cycles by an average of 20 percent in most cases, Cartesis says.

"With Cartesis Intercompany, we can put the reconciliation processes in motion much earlier, safe in the knowledge that we'll still receive accurate and real-time information," says Wiel Dings, Chief Accountant at Oce, a 2.7 billioneuro multinational delivering high-speed printing systems in 80 countries. "It has supported our drive towards standardization and makes it far easier for users to check transactions against each other to ensure everything matches."

"I am constantly surprised to find intercompany reconciliation missing from performance management implementations," says John Van Decker, senior VP and Principal Research Fellow at Robert Frances Group. "On top of improving accountability and accuracy, a relatively small investment in intercompany reconciliation software can reduce huge amounts of manpower and frustration at the end of every close."

Cartesis claims that nearly 100 of the world's largest companies already use the product, with many saving at least one person-day per reporting cycle per operating unit. Key enhancements include:

* support for Oracle as its back-end database, as well as Microsoft SQL Server, to allow even more companies to remove the intercompany process from the close-critical path;

* new support for Japanese, adding to English, French, German and Spanish and matching the language support of the Cartesis 10 performance management suite;

* leveraging Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, which improves scalability and performance with ASP.NET 2.0 controls and services; and

* a new user interface designed to integrate easily with Cartesis 10 and provide a highly intuitive user experience.

Web: www.cartesis.com