Unity® Expense Management

With market pressures forcing down the operating costs that investors are willing to pay, fund companies are challenged more than ever to control fund expenses and avoid the need to absorb costs just to remain competitive.

Effective cost control starts with gaining control over the entire expense management process – from expense payments through estimating and budgeting future costs. But, without automation, process controls that rely on manual processes are at-risk for human error and unreliable data integrity.

Designed for User Accessibility and Control

Unity Expense Management is an end-to-end solution that automates expense management – from expense payments through budgeting.

Leveraging the Unity central data hub and the combined functionality of Unity Expense Payments and Unity Budgeting, Unity Expense Management provides a controlled environment in order to completely manage investment product expenses – from the allocation and calculation of current payments to the estimation and budgeting for future payments.

With Unity Expense Management you can:

  • Reduce manual processing associated with running reports.
  • Eliminate keying of allocation data.
  • Avoid keying allocated amounts into expense memos.
  • Eliminate the manual updating of historical check registers.
  • Create a predictable and repeatable forecasting model.
  • Leverage historical payment information.
  • Eliminate the time and risk of errors associated with manual processes.
  • Automate the production and approval of expense analyses.

And these allow you to:

  • Accelerate invoice payments.
  • Facilitate easy comparison of current and historic invoices.
  • Store vendor information.
  • Generate files that can upload payments to the fund accounting system.
  • Automate expense budgeting to ensure the maximum amount of revenue is recognized by Investment Advisors who waive fees based on expense caps.
  • Reduce the chance that bond fund yields will fluctuate due to inaccurate analyses, resulting in a more competitive marketplace for your funds.
  • Automate the expense analysis process, leading to the elimination of less manual mistakes that could result in NAV errors.
  • Reduce the chance that performance data is misstated due to inaccurate analyses.

Unity Expense Management automates expense payments and accelerates the creation of budget and expense tracking documents, which allows you to:

  • Reduce Costs by spending less time and resources on manually collecting and updating information from your fund accounting system, as well as allocating and calculating expenses and creating historical records.
  • Eliminate Risk by ending the error-prone process of making assumptions based on manually populated spreadsheets and adjusting accruals.
  • Elevate Service Levels by paying invoices faster and increasing the accuracy and consistency of expense analyses, as well as identifying and resolving issues encountered in a timelier manner.
  • Increase Scalability by being prepared for growth with measures in place to easily add new products without additional resources.

Expense Documentation for Every Application

Designed to support managed investments—such as mutual funds, alternative investments, and variable products—Unity Expense Management integrates seamlessly with common desktop business applications, and lets you automatically manage the entire expense management process from your existing desktop.

And because all data is stored in a centralized database and reused for multiple purposes, you can be confident that values have been validated and controlled.

  • Collect — Import general ledger data, net asset data and outstanding shares from your fund accounting system.
  • Create— Automatically perform analyses for expenses paid and accrued using trial balance information; automate the creation of expense payment allocations, documentation, asset-based fee recalculations, files to upload payments into the fund accounting systems and electronic vendor invoice files.
  • Confirm — Know that your allocations and asset-based fee calculations are verified, that your accrual estimates are accurately derived and that your daily accrual changes are accurately calculated as budgets are adjusted.
  • Deliver— Generate approved payments, payment memos and supporting documentation reports for review and approval, as well as detailed budget analysis reports.

The Unity Platform by Design

Unity Expense Management is part of the Unity platform, the comprehensive fund administration platform from Confluence. The Unity platform replaces multiple time-consuming, costly, and error-prone manual processes with the ability to achieve mass customization, process consolidation, and complete automation of vital reporting functions through a single source.

Each of the product solutions that comprise the Unity platform is available for installation as part of your company's technology infrastructure, or online for users who prefer a fully-hosted option.

 

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For more information about Confluence products, call 412.802.8632 or contact us.