Solar Functional Summary



Introduction

Solar is an extremely powerful and flexible Asset Finance Pricing, Administration and Accounting system designed for all sectors of the Instalment Finance and Leasing Industries. Solar is a state of the art web native system which is capable of almost limitless expansion and integration with other business systems and processes. Solar is designed with Microsoft SQL Server™ relational database at its core hosted at one of Copernicus's data centres. All data changes are recorded real-time and a full audit trail by user and timestamp is available on any field in the database enabling full control of the portfolio. Solar’s flexibility enables users to start small but there is no practical limit on the number of contracts that it can manage or the variability of the structure of those contracts. Indeed, Solar has been successfully tested with a portfolio of 900,000 contracts. Solar provides Global Functionality, in terms of Culture, Language, Fiscal/Tax and Accounting by user configuration settings all in a single source code system.

Companies

Any number of Companies may be set up with parameters for:
  • Name and address
  • Year end
  • Tax payments
  • VAT registration number
  • Bank accounts (s)
  • Current accounting period
  • Currency

Products

Any number of financial products may be defined with parameters for:

  • Whether asset based, lease, loan, mortgage, revolving credit and so on
  • Tax based or non-tax based
  • VAT, Sales Tax and Property Tax as applicable to the local country requirements, and the applicable rate parameters
  • Fixed or variable rate interest and the calculation method and parameters to use
  • The rental accounting method
  • Subsidies, residuals, commissions, document fees, administration fees, option fees, stub rentals and so on
  • Maintenance and insurance requirements
  • Subsidy, commission and fee accounting treatments
  • Head lease and Back to Back
  • The default rental frequency
  • Default values for the funding rate, margin and, in the case of tax based products, the reinvestment rate
  • Default values for document fees, option fees, administration fees, other charges, late fees etc.
  • The termination method and calculation parameters.
  • Consumer or Corporate.

System Administration

As you would expect from an all-embracing system, Solar offers a wide range of configurable options to ensure that a high level of business efficiency and flexibility can be constantly maintained. These options include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Interest Rates to be defined on a daily basis for an unlimited number of defined Rates.
  • User Maintenance and Security levels.
  • Language selection by User, including redefining screen labels and adding security.
  • Ad hoc Reporting definition enabling non-IT users to create their own specific reports simply and efficiently, with output in various formats.
  • Reporting security, based on a range of criteria.
  • Letter and document definition, including document storage and tracking.
  • Status code and flexible Workflow definition.
  • Data Validation requirements e.g. Utilising the Data Check function: mandatory data, minimum, maximum, ranges and dependencies.
  • General (Nominal) Ledger mapping.
  • Fees and charges.
  • Arrears and other letter generation

Contacts

Any number of Contacts (Customers, Suppliers, Brokers, Funders, Guarantors and so on) may be set up. Solar maintains address and bank account history with a audit reports

Solar's CRM functionality enables the creation of Contact hierarchies, with easy-to-use “drag and drop” techniques. This facilitates sales prospecting and exposure reporting amongst related parties.

Contracts

Solar can control any number of Contracts. Each Contract is attached to a Company, a Customer (and other Contacts, as relevant) and a Product. Depending on the Product parameters the user will only be required to enter details relevant to that financial instrument and the Contract will automatically inherit the characteristics of the Product thus reducing the amount of data required to be entered for the Contract and Asset. A Contract defines (amongst others) a status, start date, term and default collection method. As such it represents the “umbrella” for Asset level accounting and billing.

Assets

Each Contract may have any number of Assets linked to it. Assets may be added or terminated at will and Solar will automatically recalculate receivables, deferred income and other accounting balances together with their run-off over future months. Where appropriate, “catch-up” postings are made to the current accounting period. This is possible because Solar accounts for all Assets individually.

The cash flow associated with an Asset may be simple or complex. The inclusion of subsidies, residuals, commissions and fees is governed by the Product selected when a Contract is created.

Reschedules (under appropriate security) are always performed within the same Contract i.e. there is never a need to terminate and then create a new Contract. Solar ensures that any financial amendment can be performed as required, whenever required – all within the same Contract. Solar ensures that all accounting is controlled, with all history preserved.

Within each Asset, an unlimited number of Asset detail records may be held in a hierarchical structure with any number of levels. Only top level Assets have payment streams and accounting attached thus simplifying the processing. Sub assets may be split out at any time, for example, for partial termination. Sub Assets are useful when individual costs, residual values, serial numbers and other detail is required for asset management purposes.

General Ledger

Solar maintains its own double entry bookkeeping system with each entry attached to a Company, a Product, a Contract, an Asset and a Nominal ledger account. All postings are real time with Journals attached to batches with each time-stamped batch tagged to a user. A trial balance may be generated for any reporting period down to a single day and this may be analysed by Company, Product, Contract or Asset or Customer. When appropriate multi-currency consolidation can be provided.

An automatic interface between Solar and an external General Ledger system can be provided.

Cash

Solar support many-to-many cash and credit note allocation. This means that one item of cash may cover one or more invoices or part invoices and any invoice may be satisfied by any number of cash or credit note journals. This detailed allocation ensures that the arrears report displays exactly which items are outstanding or part paid. This is vital for collections purposes. When cash is received which cannot be immediately allocated it may still be posted for later allocation. Cash and credit notes may be allocated and later deallocated and refunded or transferred to another contract for the same customer. All such postings and amendments are recorded in journals (where appropriate) and otherwise in Solar's detailed audit trail enabling the user and date and time to be identified. In addition to manual cash postings Solar provides the ability to import data such as cash received, cash reversals and failures from files uploaded to the web server.

Invoicing and Direct Debit (BACS/ACH)

Solar provides automated functions for Invoicing and Direct Debit (including AUDDIS), and manual functions for ad hoc invoicing and failures. Reprinting of Invoices is a standard function.

Settlements

Solar has numerous settlement calculation options including discounting future payments, rule of 78 and maintaining the internal or dual rate of return or the post tax margin. In each case Solar displays a cash flow report to demonstrate the calculations. All Settlement quote is stored with an expiry date, thus providing an automatic history for security and analysis.

Collections

Solar's cash allocation flexibility ensures that detailed information is available for effective collections. Notes and Promise to Pay records may be entered with follow up diarised.

Reporting

Solar provides numerous standard reports as well as powerful user-defined reports (UDR). UDR provides simple ‘drag-and-drop’ features and allows users to select the required data field from a list of available data items. He can then specify sort order, filter conditions and the required output mode. Reports created can be saved for subsequent processing and/or modification. User-defined reports are aimed at the non-IT user to enable ad hoc queries to be generated and saved to a report for export to Excel or other format. .

Documents

Solar provides facilities to create document templates (including invoice formats) for subsequent processing either manually or automatically. All documents produced are automatically stored for audit and reprinting purposes in a separate documents database. All documents produced by Solar can be either printed or sent as an email attachment. External documents can be uploaded and saved against the appropriate entity (for example, Contact, Contract, Asset) to ensure that a complete on-line electronic filing system is achieved.

Tax

Solar conforms to local tax regulations with particular attention to calculations, reporting and accounting. Solar's flexibility makes it straightforward to add further regimes to those already covered.

Security

As the most modern development and run-time environment available today, Microsoft™ has built many features into .NET to ensure optimal security ‘out-of-the-box’. Many of these features have been included within Solar, including:

  • Use of SSL (Secure Socket Layer via https) when accessing Solar.
  • Use of Firewall.
  • Optional VPN for remote access.
  • Validation of a User’s IP address.
  • URL encoding where parameters are visible to the end user.
  • Forms authentication
  • User is locked out after three login attempts.
  • Passwords and other sensitive data are encoded using 128 bit RC4 encryption.
  • Role-based user groups within Solar restrict access to parts of the system, as required.
  • Use of Stored Procedures for all inserts and data intensive tasks avoids “SQL injection” and ensures efficiency and scalability.

Technology

Solar is based on Microsoft’s state of the art .NET environment. This ensures that Solar keeps pace with technology changes so that your system will never become obsolete. Furthermore, Solar’s highly modularised approach enables integration with existing legacy systems with the possibility of a gradual take-on of data and functionality thus removing the need for an immediate systems overhaul. Solar enables companies to move gradually to a web based system thus reducing risk and facilitating manageable project deliverables.

Solar is a fully scaleable native web based system that is very simple and efficient to implement with instant deployment in our hosted environment. As a totally web native system, Solar not only has access to other web systems, but also allows remote users access to relevant parts of the system within a secure environment.

Solar is developed entirely using the C# programming language and is totally object-oriented.

Solar utilises the latest Microsoft’s SQL Server™ database, for high performance and scalability. Reporting Services, Business Objects and other SQL tools may be used to create reports, invoices and other output directly from the database