Eunoia, the business analytics company, is to unveil CFour, a comprehensive financial consolidation tool designed to significantly facilitate subsidiary and group accounting through automation in Malta in September, according to Eunoia General Manager Stefan Farrugia. CFour will be presented to potential customers internationally early next year.

Eunoia is engaged in the design and development of analytical software for small and large-scale commercial activities. The company was recently spawned from a business unit within PTL Ltd, a company of Harvest, the technology division of Hili Ventures. Eunoia is gearing up to take its product portfolio, including its remarkably successful business intelligence tool, further afield both locally and abroad.

Stefan Farrugia, General Manager, Eunoia

Consolidation is often the bane of productivity for finance managers and chief financial officers, particularly for professionals who work with traditional and cumbersome accounting software. Minor adjustments to the financials regularly necessitate laborious updates, locking down precious resources.

“Here is an automation tool that provides for accurate data, better process visibility and control, and leads to significantly faster consolidation,” Mr Farrugia explains. “Report accuracy is safeguarded as all the data is handled in a controlled environment which also allows for version traceability, all stored on one database. This ‘governed’ environment centralizes the process through a collaborative dashboard. Such a continuous structure translates into remarkably reduced lead times, which means finance departments can consolidate far more frequently as they wish. It also means CFOs can dedicate more energy and resources to financial strategy.”

The simplicity of CFour’s process flow is derived from the replication of the traditional manual process into the four distinct stages of consolidation: collate, compile, calibrate, consolidate. Hence, CFour.

CFour first collates the data from various sources such as Excel or ERP into one data stream before compiling subsidiary companies’ accounts. The third stage calibrates journal entries where inter-company elimination is logged and validated through a user-friendly interface. At the final stage, subsidiary accounts are consolidated into the holding company.

As an end-product, CFour users customize data visualisation according to their analytical needs. The Panorama Necto dashboard adopted by CFour features attractive infographics, interactive charts and KPI reporting that can be easily exported for presentation purposes.

CFour is easy to adopt. Licencees only require a few hours’ training and onboarding before use. Implementation is just as seamless. Companies with up to 10 subsidiaries can have CFour implemented within a maximum of three weeks.

“We are confident customers will realise returns on the investment in CFour quite rapidly,” Mr Farrugia says. “We calculate companies can recover the outlay within a year. Besides, the underlying architecture has been designed to manage data at scale so CFour is able to keep abreast with company growth. Eunoia itself plans to take CFour further. We are in the early stages of a cloud-based version that meets the needs of international groups of companies and we are working on adding functionalities. This is just the beginning.”