Accounting and financial advisory organisation benefits from TaskCentre’s automated cross-platform monitoring, alerting and reporting tools
Orbis Software, a provider of business process automation solutions, today announced that Moore Stephens LLP, an accounting and financial advisory organisation, is using TaskCentre to integrate and monitor over 500 databases linked to its document management system, issue notifications and alerts regarding data problems, as well as distribute reports regarding synchronisation, purchase orders and correspondence. This has improved internal processes and reduced manual, time-consuming tasks.
“We wanted to integrate data from multiple systems and then generate reports and alerts from the combined data. We knew that we needed a cross-platform monitoring, reporting and alerting tool. TaskCentre is the market leader for doing what it does – and we certainly knew that it would add value,” explained Charles Verrier, Information & Database Architect, Moore Stephens LLP. “The number of man hours required to duplicate the things that TaskCentre does automatically just wouldn’t have been worth the effort. There wouldn’t have been a business case to even do the work. This is about improving our internal processes and service quality really.”
The first task that Moore Stephens implemented in TaskCentre was to routinely monitor the database of the organisation’s document management system, to identify cases where document usage was not adhering to the company’s internal processes or according to best practice. It also monitored usage patterns to identify data problems in the database, which would then alert the IT department.
“TaskCentre automatically sends alert messages to users to let them know about a problem before it becomes a problem,” explained Verrier. “We can spot patterns in the data that, from experience, we can tell are going to cause the user a problem. We can now send them an email saying this document is going to be a problem if you don’t do something, or you need to change the way you are handling it. We have those set to run twice a week.”
Another requirement was to deliver a weekly summary to department managers of all correspondence that had been created in the department during the week. Previously, this was achieved by manually recording every letter that left the building in a physical ‘letter book’.
“TaskCentre generates a report at the end of each week, categorised and organised by department and person, and then emails it to departmental managers who need to do a quick review of activity during that week,” said Verrier. “We also use it within our purchase ledger system. Once a week it assembles a report of purchase orders still awaiting approval and circulates that report to stakeholders, just to make sure that we keep on top of our purchase ordering.”
The biggest usage, in terms of the number of alerts, stems from monitoring multiple databases to look for cases when data goes out of synchronisation. For example, when a member of staff gets married and changes their surname. As the surname can reside in any number of databases across the organisation it can be time-consuming to keep the records up-to-date.
“We use TaskCentre to monitor multiple databases and look for cases where data should be the same, but has gone out of sync. It then generates a regular report for the necessary people to inform them that they need to manually sort out a discrepancy that shouldn’t be there,” said Verrier. “Sometimes you can write custom routines to sort that out, but it’s not always possible. There could be regulatory or contractual reasons why we are not allowed to directly write to another database.”
Moore Stephens has only just started exploiting the full capabilities of TaskCentre. It is currently investigating its further use to replace some custom written reports that it uses for warning people when their timesheets haven’t been completed on time, by integrating it with its time and fees product. The organisation is also looking at using TaskCentre for monitoring its IT infrastructure.
“While there are individual applications that can monitor all of these things, they all tend to generate their own flavour of reporting and own way of alerting when something goes wrong,” said Verrier. “We have been looking at TaskCentre, therefore, as a way of consolidating alerts from other specialised systems, so that we have a single, consistent approach for generating infrastructure alerts within the business.”
About Moore Stephens LLP
Founded in London in 1907, Moore Stephens LLP is an accounting and financial services organisation that provides a wide range of financial services, from auditing and tax activities to risk assurance and wealth management. Today, the UK network has over 1,500 partners and staff. The head office in London is also the headquarters for Moore Stephens International, which is regarded as one of the world’s major accounting and consulting networks. Moore Stephens International consists of 307 independent firms with 667 representative offices and involving over 27,000 partners, principals and staff across 105 countries.
