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Unisa Shoes: Stepping up with La Crosse Financials

Located in Miami, Florida, Unisa Shoe manufactures and sells women's and men's shoes and accessories. Shoe design, marketing and distribution are done in Miami, and manufacturing in done in Spain, Italy, Brazil, and China.

The finished products are imported to the US where they are distributed to customers including Burdine's, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Dillard's, and Lord and Taylor. Unisa operates their own retail locations located throughout the country, and sell abroad to Canada, the Pacific Rim, Central and South America.

Unisa has multiple divisions, and operates with many currencies. This posed problems with their previous accounting system. Ed Bertucelli, Unisa's Controller, needed a system that could handle multi-divisional accounting, consolidations and foreign currency.

"What we needed was a system that could grow with our company. The old PC based software we had didn't handle multi-division transactions well. We have 7 legal entities that we have to account for; we get consolidations for 5 operating divisions, we have inter-company transactions, we have transactions in foreign currencies. We had to go through a lot of manual entries and a lot of steps to close the books. By going into the La Crosse Financials package we were able to speed up closing by cutting two days off the process each month."

Bertacelli credits La Crosse Financials' architecture simplified the accounting process, and gave the Department Managers more information on a timely basis.

"La Crosse Financials opened up the systems for more people to be able to use them. Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, all of the department managers are able to review their information online, in real time. It simplified significantly our major transactions and reconciliation. It made Accounts Payable more efficient, and delivered information on a real time basis. In the old system you had to load AP as a separate batch job. Now it's automatic, as soon as they post a bill it is updated to the General Ledger. AR is tied directly to the General Ledger. That used to be separate that had to be balanced and loaded separately, but in La Crosse Financials the General Ledger is updated immediately and data is ready for review and reporting."

In addition, foreign currency transactions are now easier to create, process and audit. "Before with our old system, we had to manually translate foreign transactions into U.S. Dollars, and we lost the audit trail. Now, all transactions in the Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable that cycle from our foreign operations are being translated automatically. Because the original transaction is attached to the translated transaction, we can now track them with improved audit trail capabilities.