Our client is a popular multinational family restaurant and they required a process to aid them in reconciling card transactions taken at their restaurants with their bank statements. This was a vital process to them, as it was required by the Financial Standards Authority for them to reconcile this information. This process was to import raw data received from the card vendors in to a database and then a report is run on a weekly basis to compare between the card transactions declared and the bank statements. There are other products already available to do this but the client preferred to come to us because we were extremely competitive in price but also the client could manipulate the process to suit the business needs.

The raw data comes in on a daily basis via a secure ftp connection from two sources; firstly Streamline who are vendors for card types such as Visa, Solo, Electron, Mastercard, etc. The second source for the data is American Express. The complexity of this process comes in handling the format of the raw data as it comes in a special encrypted format (each source has its own format) but also handling of the business process rules.

The technologies involved in the EMIS process are:

C#.NET – This handles retrieving the raw data file, making a connection to the Oracle database and initiating the import process.

PL/SQL – This handles processing of the raw data file by splitting up the data using the card vendor specification and importing the data using the business process logic.

Once the data is imported into the database, the client could then run their reports to reconcile the figures against their bank statements. Once they are satisfied the figures match up and discrepancies are accounted for, a file is produced from the database that the client then uses to upload the data in to their accounting software, JD Edwards (JDE).

This process has been in place for over 3 years now and still running extremely well. Except for a few changes to the business process logic there has been no need to make any changes to the process since. End result is that we have a developed an efficient solution for the client and saved them a considerable amount of money at the same time.

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