Financial Applications

Financial applications are designed to support accounting, financial, and treasury management functions. The financial applications market consists of the submarkets discussed in the following sections.

Accounting

Accounting software supports general financial management business processes such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, and fixed asset accounting, as well as more specialized functions such as credit and collections management and automation, dispute resolution, enterprise spend management, project accounting and costing, tax and revenue management and reporting, nonprofit fund accounting, point of sale, invoicing, electronic bill presentment and payment, and transactional financial reporting and business intelligence embedded into accounting applications. The following are representative vendors and products in this submarket:

• Best Software (part of Sage PLC) Fixed Asset System
• Epicor eBackoffice Financials
• Microsoft/Great Plains Financials
• Oracle Financials, including general ledger, lease management, and revenue and receivables management
• SAP R/3 Enterprise and mySAP.com accounting modules

Treasury Management

Treasury management applications support corporate treasury operations (including the treasuries of financial services enterprises) with the corresponding financial institution functionality and optimize related cash management, deal management, and risk management functions as follows:

• Cash management automation includes several treasury processes involving electronic payment authorization, bank relationship management, cash forecasting, and others.
• Deal management automation includes processes for the implementation of trading controls, the creation of new instruments, market data interface from manual or third-party sources, and others.
• Risk management automation includes performance analysis, Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 133 compliance, calculation of various metrics used in fixed-income portfolio analysis, market-to-market valuations, and others.

The following are representative vendors and products in this submarket:

• SunGard eTreasury eXchange (eTx) with AvantGard enterprise applications
• Thomson Financial Treasury Solutions
• Trema Finance KIT