Colombo-based finance teams from LOLC’s corporate office use Oracle Financials to process monthly financial reports. Financial data generated from the many leasing, loans, deposit, treasury, and other systems are fed into the general ledger through an interface developed for each system.

Each company can generate its monthly financials faster by using an integrated system and a single, standard chart of accounts across all companies.

“Previously, each company would take between 12 and 20 days to generate their monthly financial reports,” said Kotakadeniya. “It would then take a further 20 to 30 days to consolidate financial information for the whole group. Now, each company can generate monthly financial reports within 7 days.”

According to Kotakadeniya, Oracle Financials provides LOLC’s accounting staff with access to structured financial data, which improves the credibility of accounting information across the organization. It also improves the productivity of the finance team by enabling them to extract data for basic queries and analysis without assistance from IT staff.

“The system also provides flexible reporting capabilities that enable us to determine how the organization is performing by business unit, product, geographic area, and distribution channel against existing financial targets and previous performance,” said Kotakadeniya. "This information helps us make more informed decisions about our revenue mix and geographical presence.”

Oracle Cash Management has automated the reconciliation process by matching bank statements with cash book transactions. The system has introduced a more streamlined approach, which makes it easier to track these transactions with the corresponding bank entry, rather than search through many spreadsheets to find the information.

“Oracle Cash Management ensures that the thousands of transactions generated every day are matched with our books and reconciled,” said Kotakadeniya. “This is a more structured approach, which saves time and enables our accounts staff to focus on other activities that add value to the organization.”

LOLC used Oracle Assets to create an automated assets register that enables the group to track the lifecycle and depreciation of around 80,000 assets at about 60 locations. These assets include buildings and land, office furniture, computer equipment, and about 2,000 company fleet vehicles, with some asset classes carrying complex depreciation methodologies.

The organization can now track each asset from the date of purchase, and automatically calculate its depreciation over time, rather than trawl through spreadsheets to find items and manually assess the drop in value.

“We have around US$20 million worth of assets across the organization, and each item must be easily tracked and depreciated each year,” said Kotakadeniya.

“Oracle Assets enables us to quickly and easily determine exactly when office items need to be replaced or when vehicles need to be serviced.”

Oracle Purchasing provides LOLC with a centralized system for its companies to procure office supplies, such as stationery, and computer accessories and consumables. Purchasing staff use the system to order these items, which are distributed to staff across its many locations.Oracle Inventory Management is also used to centrally manage levels of office supplies across each location and identify consumption costs.

“These applications have streamlined our purchasing and stock management procedures, which has enabled us to keep an eye on spending, track items that are not moving, and identify items that need to be written off,” said Kotakadeniya.

The system also allows automated expense allocation in a shared services environment. Manually calculating expenses, such as electricity and water for each company in the group is time consuming.

“Expenses can now be allocated easily to each subsidiary, which helps identify costs to relevant business units,” said Kotakadeniya.