What solutions are there to automate and industrialize your reconciliations?
Publié
Le 15/04/2020, par :
- Olivier Van De Flaes
Sections
Context
The reconciliation of transactions and accounts is a cross-functional activity. We are talking about bank reconciliation, securities reconciliation, E-commerce reconciliation, cash, invoices, market transactions, positions, management portfolios, Front to Back, etc. The list is long and even goes beyond the concept of financial data.
The automation and industrialization of reconciliations respond to the dual problem of optimizing and making accounting and financial chains more reliable, generating productivity gains on data entry work and low added value tasks.
Why implement reconciliations ?
Financial regulations have long required companies to implement precise control processes over operations and accounts.
One of the pillars of these controls is data matching or data reconciliation. This is a risk control that allows for the rapid detection of fraud and errors of all kinds.
This control ensures the correct accounting of financial flows between different systems or counterparties.
An organizational and technical challenge
Setting up an end-to-end account and flow reconciliation process is very often both an organizational and technical challenge.
From an operational point of view
Monitoring and managing discrepancies are important steps in the reconciliation process because all discrepancies must be processed, prioritized, assigned to the right people, and resolved quickly.
A discrepancy that is not clearly identified is a potential risk for the company. It is necessary to be able to correctly distribute the analysis, justification, and correction tasks.
In addition, as soon as there is human intervention for the analysis, justification, or entry of comments, the ergonomics and flexibility of the software used are very important.
Since this activity is cyclical, the multiplication of manual management actions must not cause deterioration in the time spent by controllers.
From a technical point of view
Setting up a reconciliation as a whole can become complex and requires a high level of automation between the different processes to be taken into account such as:
Retrieving source data.
Importing source data into the solution.
Executing data matching processes.
Pre-identifying recurring discrepancies.
Generating key indicators, statistics and alerts
Exporting results to other internal systems
Purge, historicize flows according to the required needs
To conclude, it is important to set up a complete solution to automate and industrialize your reconciliations within your company.
This will allow you to gain in productivity, free up your low added value tasks and reduce your errors and discrepancies in your financial processes.
