Pharmaceutical Service Provider Maintains FASB/IASB Compliance Through JD Edwards

The Organization

The United BioSource Corporation (UBC) is a leading provider of pharmaceutical support services, partnering with life science companies to make medicine and medical products safer and more accessible.

Primary Objective

The primary objective was to ensure UBC was in compliance with FASB/IASB revenue recognition regulations, while maintaining field reporting for costs consumed and revenues received.

Key Challenges Faced

The task of get UBC equipped with the “bleeding edge” of JD Edwards revenue and profit recognition software, presented several key challenges to overcome.

UBC housed no discernible connection between invoices and costs. Therefore, many customizations were required to provide:

• Financials for Managers at the department level

• Financial visibility for Project Managers

• Financials for UBC finance personnel for reporting purposes

• Financial reporting for Senior Management

Smartbridge also had to remove the need for customized profit recognition code, which was changing the profit earned percent instead of changing the percentage complete. This also resulted in adjusting entries every period.

Smartbridge Methodology

Through applied expertise and innovative solutions, Smartbridge recognized and overcame the following milestones to ensure UBC remained in FASB/IASB compliance:

• Revenue recognition was not a good fit for the most time-intensive UBC projects, and would have required extensive modifications.

• Profit recognition with the ability to subdivide projects into different recognition dates was published immediately prior to revenue recognition design review.

• Recommended not to exceed budget in job costing to eliminate cost overruns without review and amended budgets.

• By beginning well ahead of the regulatory reporting deadline, Smartbridge removed the need for a “big bang” go-live, allowing UBC to gradually introduce the use of revenue and profit recognition on newly-created projects only.

• Continued to use current method of recording revenue and cost on existing projects until their completion.

Results

Upon project completion, UBC ended up using both revenue recognition and profit recognition based on the company and type of project. The ability to calculate percentage complete based on cost rather than revenue now gave a much more accurate picture of project status. This also lessened the need for customized code for profit recognition. In conclusion, the manual efforts of finance personnel were significantly reduced, all while maintaining accurate and timely reporting to Senior Management.