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| MATH BIZ: John Harte and Trintech make the numbers add up. photography by Vanessa Gavalya |
Trintech Executive Vice President and General Manager John Harte is not going to bite. His Irving company’s recent announcement, a reconciliation partnership with trendy clothing retailer Forever 21, could be an opportunity to sex up his line of work, but he’s quick to kill the buzz: “[Our job] sounds pretty boring.”
Luckily for Harte, Trintech’s ReconNET software and support package doesn’t need trendy appeal. With more than 450 clients relying on the software suite, including seven of the top 10 Fortune 500 retailers, Trintech has become a premier service for large corporations’ reconciliation concerns.
ReconNET oversees a process you might already expect retail companies to have worked out on their own: double-checking that thousands of daily point-of-sale transactions, when reported to a receiving party like a bank, equal out. Primarily, Trintech’s task is to make that distributed double-checking process more efficient, singling out potential sources of miskeyed registers and fraud to seal up any minor blemishes in cashflow.
But the past five years have seen Trintech’s reconciliation services change from convenient to crucial, as 2002’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act has heaped more accounting pressure upon publicly traded companies. “When numbers get rolled out to the CFO on a quarterly basis, he needs to feel confident that he can sign off without fear of something potentially nasty,” Harte says. And when numbers don’t add up, ReconNET has already processed the millions of transactions per hour a 1,000-store chain faces, finding the problem and diverting bad publicity.
Trintech’s imprint is found on more transactions than you’d think. Major chains like Sears, Target, and JC Penney; cell phone companies like AT&T and Sprint; hip outlets like Foot Locker and Hot Topic; and even the North Texas Tollway Association all have ReconNET in common. And by offering many of its clients a service package that includes both software and internal processing, Trintech keeps its clients for the long-term. (Harte boasts of a 99 percent retention rate.)
So while Forever 21 customers won’t see Trintech’s name when purchasing a summer dress, the CFO will see the name when filing a summer report. And that, really, is the fashionable part.
