System for linking financial asset records with networked assets

Abstract

A computer system to reconcile hard assets carried on the financial data reporting computer systems of a corporation or government entity with actual inventory assets discovered on the networks of said entity. Automatic discovery of inventory assets is performed by executing scripts specified in fingerprints of the types of machines the system can recognize. When a machine is found at a live P address, the fingerprint scripts determine the operating system type and extract data from the operating system regarding the attributes of the machine. Hard assets are then imported from the financial data reporting computer system, and automatic reconciliation rules are drafted by a user and run on the asset data to find inventory assets which match hard assets. Linking or pointer data is established to record each match. Then unmatched inventory and hard assets are displayed and manual matching occurs where in the user points to and selects inventory assets which match particular hard assets. Linking or pointer data is then generated for each manual match.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] Corporations usually keep two different sets of records to track their capital assets and leased assets. This does not happen intentionally. It is just a historical accident based upon the way software for use in business developed. Assets are tracked for financial reporting purposes in financial systems, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Fixed Asset modules such as SAP, Oracle and Peoplesoft. ERP systems are used to track purchasing, accounts payable, orders, capitalized assets, etc. One of the modules of ERP systems is to track fixed assets. ERP systems are used for the financial reporting requirements of large corporations. [0002] The fixed asset module will be used by the financial people in the corporation to make entries for capital assets that are purchased. For example, assume a Sun server is purchased. The entry for this transaction will show that on a particular date, a Sun server was purchased for whatever the amount was and tha...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0028] The system of the invention provides a much faster and more accurate way of determining the correct picture of its physical assets which should be presented on its financial records.

[0031] A system within the genus of the automatic discovery of IT assets software and hardware (hereafter somtimes referred to as the automatic asset discovery system) provides methods and apparatus to collect information of different types that characterize a business entity and consolidate all these different types of information about the hardware, software and financial aspects of the entity in a single logical data store. Although the automatic discovery of IT assets software and hardware is capable of discovering information about non IT assets such as leases, its capabilities to discovery the attributes of IT assets on the network will be the focus of use of this system in the present invention to do financial linkage. The data store and the data collection system will have three characteristics that allow the overall system to scale well among the plethora of disparate data sources.

[0039] In other words, by using a generic element / attribute defined structure for every type element and attribute, all the data collected can be represented in a uniform way, and programs to do cross-correlations or mathematical combinations of data of different types or comparisons or side-by-side views or graphs between different data types can be more easily written without having to deal with the complexity of having to be able to handle data of many different types, field lengths but with the same semantics from different sources. These characteristics of the data structures allow data of different types selected by a user to be viewed and / or graphed or mathematically combined or manipulated in some user defined manner. This allows the relationships between the different data types over time to be observed for management analysis. In some embodiments, the user specifications as to how to combine or mathematically manipulate the data are checked to make sure they make sense. That is a user will not be allowed to divide a server name by a CPU speed since that makes no sense, but she would be allowed to divide a server utilization attribute expressed as an integer by a dollar cost for maintenance expressed as a floating point number.

[0044] This use of a common data store allows easy integration of all data into reports and provides easy access for purposes of cross referencing certain types of data against other types of data.

Problems solved by technology

If the label was not attached to the asset or the IT department personnel do not scan the label, a discrepancy can be created.

These discrepancies represents a risk to the corporation.

If it takes such a charge but the assets are still being used, that creates an audit risk.

Discrepancies complicate that picture and increase the risk that the charge will be excessive or assets actually being used but which are not on the books do not get written off.

In large corporations where there are large numbers of assets, the two sets of asset records are rarely if every reconciled because of the enormity of the project and its difficulty and the fact that, for the most part, it has to be done manually.

Reconciliation is a labor intensive process, and IT departments know that, even if they did it, as soon as they were done, their report would be likely to be obsolete and get more and more obsolete as every day passed.

This labor intensive nature of the process plus the fact that an ongoing reconciliation is required to keep the two sets of records accurate and consistent tends to discourage IT departments from even trying to do a reconciliation.

The result is that a corporation's financial systems may be inadvertently, substantially under-reporting or over-reporting the corporation's assets on the corporate balance sheets which can be a serious violation of U.S. law.

If the corporation is large and has many assets, the external auditors will not attempt to find and verify all the hard assets as it is too expensive.

Typically, Fortune 500 companies have hundreds of locations worldwide, so it can be very expensive just in travel costs to send auditors to all locations to find all assets.

External audits performed by accounting firms routinely find discrepancies between assets carried on the books and assets found in the corporation's actual physical facilities, even in smaller samples of assets.

This is too time consuming, so they tend to sample and audit smaller collections of assets.

Because discrepancies are regularly found, corporations are forced to resort to taking financial reserves to cover the discrepancies to cover the possibility that some of the assets carried on the books may actually be missing.

This is a big problem because money in reserve cannot be ploughed back into the business or otherwise used.

Such a solution is too expensive, time consuming and is fraught with error.

The physical inventory takes too long and may require expensive and extensive travel by the auditors to all locations of a large corporation.

This costs too much.

Further, manual linkage of inventoried assets to financial records is error prone.

Most large corporations cannot afford physical inventories more frequently than one in two years.

The inventory can take many months to complete.

By the time the manual linkage is done, the inventory is already out of date.

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