G4S, a listed security services provider, has purchased the Clarity FSR reporting solution to help produce the firm's financial reports and accounts, to release to the London Stock Exchange (LSE), the Copenhagen Stock Exchange and file with Companies House, beginning with the firm's fiscal 2009 annual report. Clarity Systems says that automation of the process of producing the annual report and accounts will allow G4S to shave weeks off the time from financial close to announcements
"The rapid pace of the company's growth and the growing complexity of the financial reporting process compelled our Group Reporting team to find a more efficient way to collect and report our numbers," said Trevor Dighton, Chief Financial Officer, G4S. "By automating the process with Clarity FSR, we anticipate saving four weeks, resulting in earlier announcements but also with greater confidence in our reports."
Designed to help companies deal with increasingly complex statutory and regulatory reporting requirements, Clarity FSR automates the external reporting process – such as annual and interim reports and announcements – by linking the report to the source data, enabling auto-generation of the latest version of the report in multiple formats including XBRL, PDF, Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign.
"We're very happy that G4S selected Clarity FSR to automate their financial reporting process," said Mark Nashman, President and CTO, Clarity Systems. "Time spent on manual cross-checks, reconciliations, rounding and other mainly administrative tasks are significantly reduced with Clarity FSR, resulting in both increased efficiency and lower risk of error."
"We are impressed with how Clarity FSR can seamlessly link to our SAP BPC consolidation system, organising this data and generating our reports in a variety of statutory and regulatory formats. This eliminates the tedious and risk-sensitive job of taking the BPC data and creating multiple MS-Excel and MS-Word files from it, then cutting-and-pasting from each to create our reports," added Sally Smoker, Group Finance Manager, Reporting & Systems, G4S.
