ECRS is an area of ETL most applicable to consulting businesses, accounting agencies, and law firms, companies that bill back clients for time and costs.
Sometimes the terms refer to the state of a transaction as it is extracted from the vendor data, transformed in the ECRS and then loaded into the accounting system.
The term "transaction", in an ECRS, is generally referring to a single record of a one-time business exchange incurring debt on the part of one company with a vendor.
An ECRS reduces the amount of manual and administrative effort required to exchange data between those vendors and the clients' bills.
An ECRS also minimizes delays between the capture of cost transactions and electronic billing for various expenses as well as processing automatically into accounting databases.
Transactions with invalid data in some columns are held for subsequent correction, transformed based on "business rules" or rejected, dictated by industry—and individual company—policy.
The ECRS might include an on-line function to easily review and correct detailed cost transactions prior to passing them on.
Reviewing and correcting transactions already in the system is much easier and faster than the traditional method used by non-ECRS practices such as printing out rejections and then manually entering them directly in the billing application.
Transactions received into an ECRS are identified with information about the source used to create the cost (i.e. telephone, photocopier, delivery service, outside reproduction, etc.)
In a typical installation that incorporates cost recovery systems and electronic billing, there is a dedicated server to support the billing system (Host); a Local Area Network (LAN) to support user applications such as word processing, graphics, document management, spreadsheets; and cost recovery devices used to input data such as employee ID, client names, account numbers, etc.
An advanced ECRS includes a number of features that permit a business to control how users are set up in the system.
These accounts will receive invalid transactions (i.e. incorrect or missing data elements) that are not corrected and loaded within a company-defined grace period.
User activation status – Better, or higher-level, ECRS applications will retain employee records forever and honor hire and fire dates.
A sales supervisor might be able to see all of the phone calls his/her reps make, but only be able to write off reproduction (copy, print, scan) costs for those same subordinates.
Moving data between the application server and the Local Area Network (LAN) is simplified with an ECRS through support for a broad variety of file transfer methods, including serial communications, modem, diskette, or tape for devices not directly connected to the LAN, or for processing electronic bills from vendors.
Transaction Validation Checking - Various options may be established to monitor the movement of data from cost recovery systems and electronic bills.
Transactions with missing or invalid company account codes are typically written into an ECRS database while notifying appropriate users of their need to be corrected.
Depending on the options selected for processing transactions, an ECRS can be used as a powerful application to centralize the recording and reporting of all costs.
It eliminates the need to access different systems and applications in order to obtain cost reporting information by user, office, client or account.
Below is an example chart, grid or table has been set up to show what cost recovery administrators would need to maintain for pertinent Notifications.
With an ECRS, a business is provided with a single focus point of support for small and large firms with a diverse set of cost tracking devices and expenses.
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