When credit unions look for ways to improve service for their members, accounting systems may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But when Texans Credit Union upgraded its accounting platform, the benefits cascaded throughout the organization—saving money, streamlining operations, and even boosting morale.
In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Tracy Montez, SVP, Controller at Texans Credit Union, and LaChrisha Dourisseau, Vice President of Solution Consulting at Fiserv, shared a behind-the-scenes look at their migration to a new account platform, Prologue Financials. They were joined by James Wester, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, who contributed additional insights on the discussion.
A Cumbersome Process
With $2.2 billion in assets and more than 130,000 members, Texans Credit Union was eager to enhance service delivery. In 2020, leadership began exploring ways to scale operations for greater efficiency and speed. With a new community charter allowing them to serve all of Texas, Texans Credit Union also set its sights on growth.
“One of the things I wanted was an upgraded general ledger system,” said Montez. “While a core general ledger is great for processing loans and deposits, they’re not made with accountants in mind, so things take a lot of clicks and a lot of time. We went on a journey to find a product to help us.”
Under the old system, sharing financial reports with the CFO meant exporting data to Excel. If discrepancies arose, accountants had to manually trace each line—determining which combination of four GL accounts fed into a number, isolating the variance, and then investigating the source within the ledger.
“You would think a financial institution would be the place that would have the latest and greatest,” said Wester. “But oftentimes it’s folks in the back-office that are the ones that are having to make do.”
Enter Prologue Financials
To solve these and other challenges, Texans Credit Union adopted Prologue Financials, an accounting system from Fiserv. The workflow within Prologue saves time and increases efficiency across the entire organization.
Previously, closing the books took the team approximately five days; now they consistently close in four. When a three-day close is required, like Thanksgiving, they deliver.
“It’s a lot easier to get the reports we need to do general ledger balancing in accounts payable,” said Montez. “It helps with our month in review. When I’m going over financials with the CFO, if he has a question about a variance, we pull up prologue on the spot to view what caused the variance.”
It’s not just about efficiency—it’s about morale. After all, nobody loves accounting except accountants.
“I can’t tell you how many managers have come up to me telling me how much they love the AP workflow because it saves them so much time,” said Montez. “People turn their invoices in faster because they don’t have to allocate an hour to approving all their invoices.”
The Conversion Experience
Texans CU ended up converting in January—typically one of the busiest months for accounting—but it still managed to close January’s books within its usual five days.
“We had a good conversion experience,” said Montez. “The data was clean and the people that helped us where experienced. It let us add on a lot of new processes and GLs that we could reconcile without adding any people. We didn’t add another person to our team until late in 2024, whereas I think if we would have been on our old general ledger system, we probably would have had to add that person a year ahead of that schedule.”
Another advantage for Texans Credit Union was realizing just how much time they’d been spending on manual tasks. Once those processes were automated, the work became noticeably easier. And with remote work, it’s no longer practical to walk over to a filing cabinet to hunt through files. Now, everything is right there on the computer.
A Worthwhile Investment
Don’t think of the general ledger system within a financial institution as a cost center. Think of it as an investment in the credit union’s or bank’s ability to expand and build out new products.
Banking is not going to get any less competitive. The financial institutions that modernize their back-office will be the ones better positioned to expand, scale, and compete.
“Don’t be afraid to dream that it can be better than what you have,” said Montez. “Think through how your life could change and what you could be doing instead of the monotonous task you’re doing today. Nobody loves doing a conversion, but I promise it’s worth it.”
Dourisseau added: “Utilizing Prologue makes accounting fun again. While the accounting function is a cost center, it can add tremendous value to the organization, making it more effective, efficient, faster, leaner, and stronger. It allows that talent within the accounting function to be deployed to other projects that add value to the bottom line. That may not always be hard dollars, but these soft dollars are meaningful and can provide the competitive edge in this highly competitive environment of the financial services industry.”
