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Interwoven Introduces Comprehensive Firm-Wide Electronic Content Management Solution
Interwoven, Inc., an enterprise content management (ECM) company, announced the Interwoven Accounting solution designed to provide tax, audit, and consulting professionals with firm-wide electronic content management to consolidate all forms of content -- including financial statements, e-mails, attachments and scanned paper -- into a single, searchable, and accessible repository. The comprehensive new solution enables accounting firms, for the first time, to consistently manage, search, and retain all firm content in a consistent manner to better manage costs, improve visibility into client engagements thereby enhancing customer service and manage risk across the firm.
Stringent compliance requirements, excessive amounts of documents, e-mail overload, and a tough business climate are pushing accounting firms to look for new ways to improve productivity, cut operational costs, and manage risk. The burden to resolve these problems falls on the shoulders of firm technology professionals who are at the front lines of document and e-mail retention and risk management.
"Accounting firms today face unprecedented challenges as they strive to deliver improved client service in the face of increasing regulation, ever growing volumes of electronic and paper-based information, and the need for accurate workflow control and document archiving," said L. Gary Boomer, CEO of Boomer Consulting, Inc., a leading technology consulting firm specializing in helping accounting firms develop short and long term technology plans. "A scalable, enterprise-class content management system is critical to meeting these challenges. Interwoven's Accounting solution provides these needed capabilities and is worthy of a review by any firm seeking to gain control of their information management explosion."
Solving Real-World Needs
One firm using Interwoven WorkSite to manage firm-wide content is Eisner LLP, one of the top 25 certified public accounting and advisory firms in the United States with more than 500 employees. "In addition to enforcing our firm's critical document retention policies and compliance obligations, our partners wanted to be three clicks away from all client information," said Gary Rosenberg, CIO and principal of Eisner LLP. "Interwoven's Accounting solution has allowed us to accomplish both, with complete information access in only two clicks."
The cornerstone of the Interwoven Accounting solution is Interwoven WorkSite, the leading enterprise-class collaborative document management platform used by more 600,000 professionals at over 1,300 organizations worldwide. The Interwoven Accounting solution aggregates all critical business content into engagement or client-centric WorkSpaces allowing professionals to quickly view all content such as documents, completed financial statements, engagement letters, scanned documents, and e-mails alongside critical dates, actions, and billing data in a single integrated view. All employees in the firm with appropriate permissions can then get an up-to-date view into any client or engagement related documents or correspondence from anywhere at anytime, without requiring significant change to the way they like to work.
The Interwoven Accounting solution provides capabilities for document management, team collaboration, e-mail management, workflow, and records management to address five key business needs:
* Unified E-mail and Document Management -- By enabling professionals to store and search e-mails alongside relevant documents in a single engagement file, employees gain better visibility into the status of any engagement/client and new team members may be brought up to speed easily. Integration with assurance, reporting and analysis tools, robust tax preparation software, and time and billing systems provide users visibility into all critical business content associated to a specific engagement or client, regardless of where any document may exist. This integration provides users with a unified view of the entire engagement and enables quick search and retrieval of documents, e-mails, and scanned images via advanced search, custom metadata or document type;
* Engagement/Client-Centric Visibility -- WorkSite provides a dashboard view of billing, content and status by client or engagement. In doing so, WorkSite enables firm management to ensure maximum utilization of resources across offices and teams. Internal coordination and status meetings become more productive as team members and managers remain up to speed easily with wide ranging projects;
* Real-Time Client Services -- The single dashboard view also improves customer service by enabling speedy responses to client inquiries and by enabling firms to share specific documents with the client via secure extranets;
* Knowledge Sharing -- WorkSite allows workers in different regions to easily search all client engagements to locate, access and leverage relevant precedents and best practices. Templates for specific types of engagements such as valuations, tax planning and M&A may be created and re-used. By using WorkSite, accounting firms can get new hires up to speed quickly and implement and enforce firm-wide best-practices and policies;
* Systematic Retention & Compliance -- WorkSite helps organizations create, implement and enforce consistent firm-wide content retention and records management policies, making content compliance and records management a nearly effortless by-product of regular work. Metadata can be automatically applied based on the location in which documents and e-mails are filed and then retention policies may be automatically applied. This practical approach to managing the retention and destruction of e-mails, documents and all relevant engagement content reduces firm risk, and speeds electronic discovery in case of legal or regulatory inquiry.
"Until now, firms seeking to manage content retention have had to piece together numerous point solutions, resulting in needless duplication of efforts, lost productivity, the inconsistent application of records management policies and an inability to meet increasing client demands for information on the status of engagements," said Dan Carmel, vice president of Legal, Professional Services and Compliance Solutions. "By providing a unified approach to these challenging issues, built on a proven enterprise- class platform, Interwoven's Solution for Accounting delivers the first practical firm-wide approach for managing the full engagement life cycle and content retention."
Availability
The Interwoven Accounting solution is available from Interwoven today. For a full list of product features and benefits, visit http://www.interwoven.com/solutions/accounting/index.html .
To learn more about the Interwoven Accounting solution, there will be a complimentary Webinar entitled, "7 Ways Firm-Wide Content Management can Help your Accounting Firm Thrive" on Wednesday, June 30, at 9 am PT (11 am CT / noon ET / 5 PM GMT). Keynote speaker is Gary Boomer, CEO of Boomer Consulting, creator of the Boomer Technology Circles and the accounting industry's leading authority on technology management. To register visit http://www.interwoven.com/events/online/ . 15.06.2004, Interwoven, Inc.
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