As financial institutions merge and evolve, the pressure on back-office operations grows just as quickly as it does on member-facing services. Accounting teams that once relied on manual processes and patchwork systems are now expected to deliver greater accuracy, faster reporting, and the flexibility to support future growth.
As a result, many banks and credit unions are reevaluating whether their current accounting platforms can keep pace—and looking for partners that can support both today’s demands and tomorrow’s challenges.
In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Kellie Rychwalski, Chief Financial Officer at Del-One Federal Credit Union, Kandra Person, Senior Solution Consultant at Fiserv, and James Wester, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Research and Strategy, discussed the accounting solutions available to financial teams today. Newer platforms have made significant advances compared to the way things were handled in the past.
“I was just looking for efficiencies,” said Rychwalski. “Simply being able to attach a PDF of an invoice to an accounts payable or fixed asset transaction instead of filing is a huge time saver.”
Seeking a Platform with Greater Functionality
When Rychwalski joined Del One in 2012 as the Director of Accounting, she found an integrated general ledger (GL) system that lacked much of the functionality the credit union needed.
“We were looking for something that was core agnostic,” said Rychwalski. “We knew that we would be changing data processors or core systems at some point, and didn’t want to have to continuously move the GL.”
Del-One eventually selected Fiserv’s financial accounting and finance operations platform, Prologue, in a hosted environment. The credit union would receive full support from Fiserv, and if they changed core systems in the future, they wouldn’t need to replace the entire GL again.
When the credit union merged with Louviers Federal Credit Union and migrated its GL into Prologue, the transition was easy for the team to absorb. From day one, they were able to produce consolidated financials without waiting for the operational merge date.
“We could still balance to the different core processors of their different outside vendors, but we could bring our financial statements together as one consolidated financial statement,” Rychwalski said. “For the person who spent two months manually combining them, that was a really big deal.”
Streamlining Approvals
The sheer volume of AP that flows through a thriving credit union can be daunting. Prologue helps alleviate the burden by assigning approval limits, connecting the appropriate invoices to each transaction, and routing everything through the approval workflow automatically. It eliminates the need for staff to chase down approvals manually.
“The system knows that anything over $100,000 has to go to my supervisor, so it’ll come and get my approval and then it’ll send it over to my supervisor,” Rychwalski said. “Nobody is running around trying to make sure they got all the signatures, and the actual transaction has the invoice and approval history attached to it.”
Prologue allows Del-One to establish policy limits that determine who can approve transactions and at what amounts. If an amount requires a second approval, the workflow automatically routes it to the appropriate person. Instead of tracking down signatures on paper invoices, approvals are connected digitally from the start.
“Many of the prior processes were ad hoc processes that solved the problem when they were first developed, then they just became standard operating procedures,” said Wester. “Having a system that can automate that and make people more efficient gives you more time to do other things that are more important to the business.”
Moving Beyond a Patchwork System
Many legacy systems exist only in the minds of long-time employees. Rychwalski explained that previous budgets were prepared through an elaborate network of spreadsheets—a process that was not only unsustainable, but also difficult to transfer to others.
“I needed something that would calculate interest income and expense that would allow me to project based on rates,” Rychwalski said. “And that’s what Vantage brought to us. I’m able to project that if the rates go up, this is the way it’s going to look. I can build formulas.”
The previous spreadsheet process consumed a tremendous amount of time, both in maintaining the files and in training others. It also created accuracy issues, since manual processes inevitably introduce human error.
“The accuracy also increases because Vantage brings in the account level detail, the instrument level detail from those cores,” Person said. “With it being core agnostic, it’s bringing in all that detail to calculate all the cash flows for those specific investments, loans, shares, and deposits.”
Ready for the Future
Organizations investing time and money into these products must understand that proper mapping is critical. Teams need to understand how the GL is structured, what accounts are grouped together, and how to maintain consistency while still leaving room for future changes and growth.
“You’re going to create products that you haven’t thought about yet,” said Rychwalski. “You have to be able to understand how to update new products, create new products, and change the ones that you have.”
