A Guide to Account Reconciliation Management

We live in a fast-changing world where the need for speed, quality, and control in the financial close process is on the rise. Now, the pressure on finance professionals to provide management with reliable information that supports faster decision-making as well as provides strategic guidance on important decisions has notably increased. To keep up with the competition, and an ever-evolving landscape, more and more organizations are simplifying and streamlining their reconciliation processes through automation.

Turn Reconciliation Challengees Into Major Opportunities

Common Risks and Challenges

• Incorrect data
• Lengthy financial close period
• Forgotten accounts or reconciliations – or multiple people performing the same reconciliation without knowing it
• 95% of time spent on cumbersome transaction reconciliations that match rather than solving the exceptions
• Poor resource optimization
• Lack of overview and status
• Write-offs due to reconciliations being performed at a bulk level to accommodate high transaction volumes, which may hide duplicate or missing transactions
• Incorrect decisions due to infrequent reconciliations that may lead to wrong numbers

Valuable Opportunities

• Numbers you can actually trust
• Shorter financial close due to faster, continuous reconciliation
• A full overview of who’s done what, when, how, and why?
• Enforced segregation of duties
• Secured governance needs, reduced risks
• Risk tagging and prioritization of accounts
• Clearly defined milestones and procedures
• Automatic reconciliation of low-risk, non-key accounts
• More time for strategic activities
• More time to check exceptions that don’t match
• Cost savings on multiple levels

Optimize Your Reconciliation Management

Financial and operational reconciliation is a core component of the broader financial close — a lot like cooking with good ingredients. With well-sourced, high-quality ingredients, it’s very difficult to go wrong. So how do the best companies in the world get it right? There’s something magical about securing a strong reconciliation management process.

Navigating a World of Reconciliation

The need for fast, accurate reconciliation is ever-present, and automation can help produce reliable results no matter what the situation.

• Bank Reconciliation: Keeping track of any differences in your own organization’s bank statement and those supplied by the bank is time-consuming.
• Foreign Currency Accounts: What currency do you work in? And what’s your monthly rate?
• Direct Payments: Direct payment can cause your accounting department to be flooded with multi-page statements, which, without automation, are simple but transaction-intensive.
• Balance Sheet Substantiations: New cloud-based systems can replace manual steps, allowing you to keep track of all accounts, irrespective of the number of companies, banks, businesses, and accounts.
• Intercompany Accounts: The reconciliation of internal balances is complicated by many factors, which increase with the number of companies, currencies, and accounts involved.
• External Suppliers: Reconciling the accounts of external suppliers is another challenging area and requires significant attention to detail.

Download this eBook to discover the best practices for reconciliation management.