Finance and Accounting Outsourcing

Cost reduction pressures, increasing regulatory compliance and demands for a closer alignment to the business are driving the need to implement a new finance and accounting operating model. Leading Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are leveraging finance and accounting outsourcing as a strategy to change their operating models. WNS is recognized by its comprehensive service offerings that support end-to-end functions in a CFO's office.

WNS ‘extends your enterprise’ by leveraging our deep finance and accounting functional expertise, industry intimacy, focus on operational excellence and global delivery model. CFOs outsource accounting services to WNS so that their internal teams focus on core business issues, while the WNS team delivers to goals of standardizing finance and accounting processes, transforming the finance operations and lowering costs.

Our service offerings include

Procure to Pay

■ Accounts payable

■ Expense reports

■ Payment processing

Record to Report

■ General accounting

■ Fixed assets

■ Tax filing and reporting

■ Cost accounting

■ Inter-company accounting

■ Statutory reporting

■ Month-end reporting and consolidation

Order to Cash

■ Accounts receivable

■ Billing and cash application

■ Order management

■ Credit control

■ Collections

Corporate Functions

■ Treasury

■ Cash management

■ Financial planning and analysis

■ Tax and compliance

■ Decision support

■ Management accounting

Supply Chain Finance

■ Product costing

■ Inventory accounting

■ Manufacturing accounting

Industry-Specific Accounting

■ Passenger revenue accounting

■ Revenue audit and recovery

■ Claims management

■ Loan account maintenance

■ Royalty accounting

■ Fiduciary accounting

Case Studies

Industry : Logistics
Process: Airway bill manifesting Finance and accounting - Billing, Invoice adjustment, Cash application, Accounts payable

End-to-end consolidation of the order-to-cash cycle for a global air delivery and freight services provider

Key features of the WNS solution include

Standardizing a geographically spread operation for F&A processes by process consolidation and sharing uniform best practices with all locations for simplification of work
Managing a huge volume of over 11 million airway bills per annum, or approximately 50,000 transactions per day with an accuracy of over 99.7 percent
Improving the turnaround time for billing of consignments from 96 hours to 48 hours
Reducing unapplied cash from over 8 percent to consistently lower than 2 percent

Industry : Electronics, media and entertainment
Process: Treasury operations

Improving regulatory compliance reducing operational costs for the treasury operations of one of the world's largest electronics, media and entertainment conglomerates

Key features of the WNS solution include

Reduced operational costs by over 40 percent year on year
Improved client's SOX compliance, achieving zero non-conformities on successive SOX audits.

Industry : Communications
Process : Supply chain knowledge management

Helping SITA build agility into their supply chain management to optimize product delivery and increase service levels

Key features of the WNS solution include

Exceeded telesales target in 2007 by 37 percent
Generated savings by focusing on debt collection of small to mid-sized customers
Supported improvement of on-time delivery of customer orders by 20 percent in one year
Supported the provisioning of more than 13 new products in four years
Successfully managed the service delivery of nearly 27,000 orders in one year
Reduced the average handling time of customer portal requests from eighteen days to three and a half days using LEAN methodology

Industry: Travel
Process: Sales accounting, Uplift / traffic processing, Revenue recovery and audit, Interline billing – sample and non-sample, Error handling

Optimizing passenger revenue accounting processes for SAS Airlines

Key features of the WNS solution include

Identifying recoveries of several million dollars within one year
Improving accuracy in interline sampling from 98 percent to 99 percent within a year, resulting in significant revenue protection
Delivering over 50 percent improvement in turnaround time and managing over 7.5 million exception transactions within one year
Reducing the cost of revenue accounting operations by approximately 30 percent annually

Industry: Quick Service Restaurant
Process: Finance and Accounting Technology Solutions

WNS takes Church's Chicken's F&A offshore all the way, with results that make the restaurant retailer crow.

When fast food restaurant franchise Church’s Chicken was divested and sold by its parent company to a private equity group three years ago, the new owners were confronted with three choices involving its finance and accounting functions—continue to outsource them to the incumbent service provider, put the outsourcing contract out to bid, or build an internal finance and accounting team and forgo outsourcing altogether.

Industry: Travel
Process: Passenger revenue accounting

Helping Caribbean Airlines transform its revenue accounting process

Key features of the WNS solution include

A fully managed service eliminating the need to invest in infrastructure or software license fees, and manage staff capacity
A scalable end-to-end service, on an automated workflow platform which is easy to customize and implement
Automation of critical processes such as invoice generation, accounting, revenue processing and MIS, which were previously done manually
Transitioning CAL's revenue accounting processes onto JADE, in a short span of 4 months against an industry standard of 8 months.

Industry: Travel
Process: Revenue accounting and recovery

Helping United Airlines in revenue accounting and recovery, resulting in significant cost savings, process efficiencies and enhanced recoveries

Key features of the WNS solution include

Managing end-to-end passenger revenue accounting operations including complex functions of interline, auditing, investigation, refunds and collections
Stringent service level agreements
Multi-location delivery to ensure business continuity
Highly skilled staff
Proprietary staff training capabilities
Rigorous quality assurance and Six Sigma programs
Robust program management and migration methodology

Industry: Travel and Leisure
Process: Fare filing

Helping a leading Global Distribution System (GDS) improve speed and accuracy of the fare filing process thereby significantly reducing debit memo payouts

Key features of the WNS solution include

Consolidated and standardized the fare filing process for over 450 airlines
Increased accuracy of fare filing from 88 percent to 94 percent within 24 months which resulted in significant reduction of debit memo payouts that were a result of data coding errors
Improved compliance of turnaround time for fare filing from 90 percent to 99.5 percent post transition to WNS
Increased the volume of filings by 157 percent in 3 years with only an 82 percent increase in resource. This achievement significantly surpassed the average productivity of experienced onshore analysts when the work was handled by the client onshore.

Industry: Travel and Leisure
Process: Passenger Revenue Accounting Customer Care

WNS and Virgin Atlantic Partnership Takes Off:
Revenues Accelerate through Improved Processes

In 2004, Virgin's passenger traffic had increased - a success for the airline, especially given rising fuel prices, a volatile business environment, and a saturated employment market. This also meant Virgin had to manage rapid growth while keeping overhead costs down. So, executive management decided to re-evaluate its operating model to improve efficiency, and increase its competitive advantage, and employ a scalable workforce.

Industry: Utilities and Energy
Process: Customer service Exceptions billing management

Helping a leading utilities company deliver superior customer service, reducing customer complaints by 80 percent in one year while reducing operational costs

Key features of the WNS solution include

Exceptional reduction in backlogs from 15 million to just over 1 million in 18 months
Reduction in customer complaints by 80 percent within 12 months of go live
Realization of over GBP 8 million in the year 2006-07 of revenue in 12 months by restructuring the debt accrual process and identification of interest leakage in supplier payments through Six Sigma programs