Speakers
Description
Modern financial operations in large scientific organizations increasingly rely on sustainable, modular, and well-integrated software ecosystems. Over the past years, the FAP-BC group of CERN has focused on modernizing key financial processes by adopting service-oriented approaches, strengthening system integrations, and reducing long-term maintenance costs.
This paper presents recent work in three complementary areas. First, we describe the integration of a cloud solution, Esker, for invoice processing, including support for invoices without purchase orders to address specific operational scenarios such as enhanced travel invoice controls. Esker’s connector-based architecture, including native SAP integration and extensions towards other ERP systems (e.g. CEGID XRP), is discussed in the context of maintainability and adaptability to evolving European e-invoicing regulations.
Second, we introduce a generic “simple” financial approval service that enables the centralized approval of expenditures initiated outside CERN’s core administrative platform (EDH). By externalizing approval logic into a configurable service, this approach minimizes the need for bespoke workflow developments, promotes reuse, and allows external systems to capture user requests while maintaining a consistent financial approval process.
Finally, we present FINWS, a web service designed to integrate operational applications with financial backends. FINWS provides a stable, reusable interface and supports future extensions, including AI-assisted use cases for financial validation.
These developments illustrate how applying software engineering best practices modularity, integration, and reuse can improve both maintainability and operational efficiency in financial and administrative systems of large organizations such as CERN.