Out-of-the-box, ARCS makes it easy to “oh, and this!” when adding new scope. The obvious example is monthly maintenance. Reconciliation Administrators and Power Users can build new Profiles to deploy for future months (or even the current month) with relative ease. With the “Copy” feature, previously created Profiles can serve as ready-to-use templates and reduce the manual effort involved in building a Profile from scratch.
[Screenshot 1: The Copy function from the Actions drop-down list can be used to duplicate existing Profiles*]
Copying existing Profiles, as seen in Screenshot 1, is intuitive, built-in functionality. This makes ARCS “Quick Starts” a popular project option when tight on a budget – the Partner will be contracted to create a limited subset of Profiles and the Client can then use these as a starting point to build out the rest, saving on the Build Phase effort.
Another common post-project add are Custom Attributes. As companies become more familiar with how their end users utilize the tool, new Custom Attributes can be included for reporting purposes (such as filtering or sorting in dashboards), providing information, or collecting feedback. Beyond the three system attributes of Process, Account Type, and Risk Rating, some typical Custom Attributes include source system names, supplemental detail such as cost center or department, or even more dynamic fields such as auto-populating metadata descriptions. Furthermore, where these are placed within a reconciliation changes the nature of what detail is being provided or collected. Custom Attributes can be placed at a reconciliation’s summary level, on each individual transaction, and even on the specific Action Plans within each transaction. Additionally, these can be inherited from a Format or set for individual Profiles. What information is useful or relevant to end users will change depending on the granularity.
[Screenshot 2: Custom Attribute on the Summary tab*]
[Screenshot 3: Custom Attribute on a Transaction*]
[Screenshot 4: Custom Attribute on an Action Plan*]
The variety of locations within the reconciliation to place these Custom Attributes, as seen in Screenshots 2 – 4, and the ease at which these can be added provides your company with the flexibility to determine ‘what’ and ‘where’ information should be presented.
ARCS provides a plethora of tools to grow the application with your company and add-on to your “Day 1” implementation. But what if you like what you have built, and just want to tweak it? Perhaps you want to move from “fat fingering” to fully integrating with your ERP source systems? Join me in the next entry as we discuss how ARCS can be modularly modified, keeping what you have…but better.
*Screenshots taken from the patch 1806 release.