There are several reasons why a company´s close process drags longer than what anyone cares to admit. Account reconciliation is certainly one of the more known reasons for delays in closing.
The bigger the organization, the more complex its accounts and operations are and the more complex the process becomes.
There are a significant number of accounts that need checks, analysis, and reconciliation every month. Sadly, and painfully, many organizations still manually reconcile today. It is in the overwhelming volume of manual tasks that closing of the books become a pain.
Simply put, if a business is serious about improving the quality and speed of its close process, automation is the way forward.
The market is saturated with account reconciliation software. However, we are of the firm belief that it is better to adopt an end-to-end budgeting solution or what others today refer as full spectrum FP&A solution.
The reason for this is because we think that having a complete budgeting software covers all or majority of the accounting process from forecasting to variance analysis to reporting to closing of the books. This way you minimize costs by eliminating the need to have a specific solution per issue. This goes without saying, you should never compromise on capabilities either.
A complete and cloud-based budgeting software like Performance Canvas Financials not only looks at how you work and suggests ways to optimize how you work, it also offers you automation of tasks from account reconciliations to AR/AP to report creation to forecasts and more in order to cut the cycle time by 50-90%. It is today´s preferred solution for budgeting, reporting, forecasting, and financial consolidation. It works in a modular way so you can extend it to other tasks like sales budgeting, AR/Ap automation, among other things.
Going back to account reconciliations, once you decide on adopting an account reconciliation solution either via point solution or a full FP&A suite like Performance Canvas Financials, there are 3 focus areas to think about when working on account reconciliation automation.
- Source systems Connection
- Make sure you connect directly to your source systems. Here, we are talking about your General ledger and/or ERP system.
Make sure your GL and subledger accounts that match can be posted instantly to make sure it is easy to generate your actuals into reports and forecasts.
- Automatic Flagging
- One of the pains of account reconciliation is matching. Make sure you can automatically identify all those accounts that do not match so you can use your time wisely by focusing on those that need further digging.
- Automated Workflows
- Use automated workflows n order to minimize manual tasks in the entire process.
As mentioned above, adopting a complete and cloud-based budgeting solution like Performance Canvas Financials affords your business workflow automation, business modeling, version control, audit trails, automatic anomaly detection, and more aimed at improving transparency and control of the entire FP&A process.
Just to be clear, even if Performance Canvas Financials is in the cloud, you can use it to connect to any on prem or cloud ERP system. You can even extend to add-ons like Power BI.
Have a look at it and see for yourself what it can do. Email info@dspanel.com to request for a free online demo or visit www.performancecanvas.com for more information.
DSPanel offers cutting edge technology platform for business analytics, planning, and visualization. DSPanel designs, builds, and operates with the end users in mind. Performance Canvas was created by DSPanel to answer the unarticulated needs of the market not addressed by previous available solutions. With Performance Canvas, information is transformed into valuable business insights for the business executives to utilize in their decision-making process. DSPanel currently has over 2500 organizations deploying their solutions.
