Account reconciliations
Account reconciliation is often the bottleneck in closing the books on time. Numerous accounts have to be analyzed and reconciled each month. When performing these reconciliations manually, the sheer volume can make the task seem daunting. With the proliferation of financial process automation systems today, it's now possible to automate unnecessarily manual and time-consuming tasks across functions and applications.
Connecting your General Ledger, sub-ledgers and other source systems directly to the software you use for account reconciliation, and to feed them into budgeting, forecasting and other FP&A platforms.
Identifying exceptions to review, adjust, reconcile and post to the GL in final form.
Facilitating workflow automation throughout the process of identification, remediation and reconciliation.
Bank reconciliations
Automating the bank reconciliation process delivers much the same value as that of reconciling subledger exceptions. Flagging just the transactions requiring investigation and reconciliation, automation frees up your Finance team's time from searching for those exceptions manually. When you have multiple bank accounts and in different currencies and high-volume transactions each month, automation addresses an even greater degree of complexity and magnitude of transactions to review – a process that would otherwise take up days or even weeks of your Finance team's time.
Bank statements reconciliation is historically performed in spreadsheets: comparing online payments plus batches of offline transactions with the internal records. With automation, input data from disparate sources can automatically populate the reconciliation accounts. The system can apply the necessary data cleaning and enrichment operations without human intervention.
Reconciliation at the transaction level can now be executed with user-selected degree of automation – from the traditional manual typing of selected lines, all the way to completely hands-off scheduled match across all accounts. Rule-driven matching by multiple criteria increased the successful match rates. Automation also supports matching by amount with predefined variance tolerance.
The categorization of bank fees, commissions, taxes, and currency differences happens instantly by exceptions identification and automated labeling to streamline the investigation and resolution of outstanding items. With Automation, the client also has granular user access controls at account and functional level.
Foreign exchange reconciliations
Working with various bank accounts involving different currencies requires a enormous resources and efforts fore reconciliations. Foreign exchange rates fluctuate day over day and changing FX rates will impact a company's realized gain/loss on its financial statements. Moreover, timing differences across the various financial systems can also cause differences in cash. These typically include differences between Billing System and Payment Processor payouts, and Bank cash. Timing differences are often tedious to identify at month-end, especially when FX reconciliations are performed manually. Companies must consider automating their FX reconciliation and cash matching process to decrease risk of manual errors.
FOREX markets also tend to be strongly regulated, requiring transparent audit trails for financial processes. Therefore a tailor-made automation solution is the need of the hour that can rapidly match and manage foreign exchanges, streamline your FX trade flow, flag critical anomalies early and save time and perform multi-process reconciliations efficiently.
With automated matching rules, firms can quickly match thousands of transactions. This speeds up the reconciliation process exponentially.
Intercompany reconciliations
Intercompany reconciliation is when two branches of a parent company reconcile figures as a result of engaging in a transaction. The problem is that an invoice booked on the Accounts Receivable (AR) at one subsidiary is often not booked on the Accounts Payable (AP) of the payer, on time, correctly, or at all. This gives rise to differences affecting the consolidated accounts. In addition to this the reconciled data and documentation is often not stored centrally, there are frequent mismatches at the accounts level due to delays and consolidated balance sheets need manual adjustments, which is error-prone.
The entire process demands a lot of time and attention. Finance teams also experience a high level of dissatisfaction during this process and the effort undertaken to resolve any issue is significant and demotivating for Finance teams.
Expense reconciliations
Growing firms see a substantial increase in transactional volumes which require automation of transaction matching, more refined aggregated reporting, and better visibility into outstanding items. The legacy tools and the manual spreadsheet-driven approach are not sustainable under the growing data volumes of transactions from accounts payable vendors, accounts receivable partner, bank account statements, credit card processors, third party issuers, and the ERP.
Expenses reconciliation involves matching the payments reported through their merchant account statement against the cash arriving at their bank account. The goal is to make sure your bank transactions tie up with what's recorded in your financial statements.
