Kantata Feature Spotlight: How Talan Streamlines Financial Operations with Intercompany Accounting

Talan, a leading global consulting and technological expertise group which accelerates the transformation of its clients through data, innovation and technology, faced challenges managing internal transactions between business units across its global network. Following a strategic imperative to streamline financial operations and enhance transparency in the face of rapid expansion, Talan turned to Kantata. 

This spotlight explores how Talan leverages Kantata SX’s Intercompany Accounting capability to achieve critical business goals and drive impactful results.

The Strategic Imperative: Talan Needed to Streamline Financial Management Across Multiple Entities 

Managing financial transactions across legal entities is a complex challenge for any organization. For Talan — a leading consultancy managing business units across countries on five continents — creating a robust intercompany accounting ecosystem that could drive transparency and predictability into services profitability was critical to ensuring accurate revenue recognition, efficient invoicing, and seamless financial consolidation across the enterprise.

With an aggressive acquisition and expansion strategy, Talan recognized the importance of selecting the right platform to achieve its multi-entity financial management objectives — especially on a global scale.

By moving away from the limited functionality of a homegrown solution, Talan sought to:

• Enable delivery teams to share resources easily across countries and service lines with visibility and alignment of revenue sharing opportunities 
• Improve financial visibility for all legal entities and business units throughout the enterprise 
• Streamline intercompany billing and simplify the customer invoicing process

“As we became an increasingly complex international enterprise, our legacy solution was not adapting to our growth or integration objectives. We needed a compliant, multi-entity financial management tool to consolidate and align our ways of working across the organization — seamlessly, transparently, and without duplicating effort.” 

-Julien Weill, Group Delivery Director, Talan

The Solution: Simplifying Intercompany Transactions

Businesses like Talan use Intercompany Accounting in Kantata SX to streamline the management of internal transactions between different business units.

 

This feature provides several capabilities that enable efficient intercompany invoicing and internal revenue sharing.

• Automatically allocate internal cost and revenue between business units based on predefined rules
• Use internal rate cards to determine intercompany resource rates, allowing for fixed or factor-based calculations
• Generate detailed performance analysis reports that provide insights into internal revenue & cost allocations
• Leverage low-touch “What-if?” functionality to automatically apply rate changes from effective dates 
• Seamlessly integrate with existing financial systems for streamlined invoicing and reporting

“Before Kantata, we were duplicating our projects, creating a project for external invoices to our customer and then a mirror project that reflected internal revenue and internal invoices based on internal resource rates. Now, with Kantata, project managers have one source of truth for their project, and they can feel confident using any resource because the cost of using them is predictable and included in margins.”

-Amaury de Brisoult, Director of Delivery, Talan 

The Process: Eliminating Duplicated Effort and Improving Financial Visibility Worldwide  

Using Kantata, Talan has eliminated data silos and duplicative effort with a single source of truth that provides real-time visibility into the margins and revenues of all its operations, everywhere in the world. With better control of the financial big picture throughout the company, Talan’s project managers, executives, and resources alike spend their time on tasks that create value rather than focusing on rote administrative duties.

At Talan…

• Internal Rates are routinely loaded every half year to ensure confidence and consistency in the internal pricing framework
• Intercompany logic is identified and applied automatically in Kantata as part of the commercial framework as the project is set up
• Rate changes & FX calculations are applied systematically and proactively, saving days of finance time and retrospective reconciliation
• Internal invoicing is completed monthly and separately from external billing, reducing consolidation time
• Internal margins are visible and predictable, ensuring resource sharing is unhampered by hidden costs
• Shareholder and management reporting is automated and accurate — not reliant on inefficient manual activity 
• The business has an accurate and reliable forward view of performance and improved capacity management

“By replacing the mix of tools we were using to raise invoices and track revenue and transactions between business units with Kantata, we have automated many actions around intercompany billing, making the process much more transparent and efficient.”

-Amaury de Brisoult, Director of Delivery, Talan 

The Results: Kantata Drives Enhanced Efficiency and Financial Accuracy

Kantata SX provides decision-makers at Talan with a clear and comprehensive view of project margins and financial statuses across every entity and business unit. This, in turn, has enhanced leadership’s ability to make confident decisions based on up-to-the-minute information from every corner of the global enterprise. 

Kantata SX has also empowered Talan’s project managers, providing them with the tools to act independently with greater control and visibility. This shift has streamlined operations and reduced reliance on back-office support to manage both monthly processes and day-to-day operations.

These improvements have driven a reduction the monthly closing period for its entire global operation by several days.

Check out the full success story to learn more about how Kantata empowers efficiency at Talan.

“Using Kantata we have simultaneously doubled our size and number of countries while also reducing our closing time by several days and improving confidence in our figures, which are now the same for everyone.”

-Amaury de Brisoult, Director of Delivery, Talan 

Talan isn’t the Only Business Seeing the Impact of Managing Periods in Kantata

Check out Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study, based on interviews with multiple Kantata customers, to learn how Kantata streamlines back office processes, cutting the time it takes to complete month end in half.