Finance Monthly April 2019 Edition

34 www.finance-monthly.com SPECIAL FEATURE - AUTOMATED RECONCILIATION Addressing Perils of the Financial Close For organisations with millions of transactions, closing the books is no easy feat. Quarterly, half-year and annual financial reports — along with other forms required by regulatory agencies — keep the accounting team working to meet deadlines year-round. Financial statements face external scrutiny from regulatory agencies in every country in which the company operates. Additionally, there are shareholders, boards of directors and in-house audit and compliance teams analysing the numbers. There is great pressure to avoid mistakes, and no one feels that pressure quite like the CFO who signs off on the books. By attesting to their veracity, he or she assumes a great deal of personal liability. But manual reconciliation processes used by many companies today provide no audit trail showing how the balance sheet was derived. As a result, executives must certify the data without visibility into how the numbers were achieved. And once financial leaders sign off, there isn’t an easy way to backtrack and gain visibility into the data they approved. Without an automated process, reconciling items such as payments, disbursements, commissions, and bank accounts at the transaction level is a labour-intensive and error- prone process. In addition, due to the lack of an audit trail, companies often write off unresolved exceptions because they cannot trace an error back to the source — raising the question of possible fraud. Exacerbating the problem are the large stores of disparate data that must be taken into account during the reconciliation process. Data can come from internal departments or third-parties; in the form of text files, spreadsheets or PDFs; it can involve multiple currencies; and it can refer to a payment, customer information or a myriad of other data. Different sources and different structures of data make manual reconciliation difficult. Automated reconciliation can enable companies managing high volumes of transactions to track, match and archive all incoming data, Driven by the promise of greater efficiency and better user experiences, digital transformation has become a key initiative across a broad range of industries. Renata Sheyner from Fiserv says that to varying degrees, this transformation can extend to day-to-day financial processes, and one of the ripest areas for improvement is reconciliation. While there may be no silver bullet that solves every reconciliationchallengeanorganisationmay face, automation comes close. Automating this time-consuming and error- prone process has the potential to boost the bottom line and reduce the risk of compliance deadline misses and mistakes. Renata Sheyner, Director, Product Management, Financial Control Systems at Fiserv THE (ALMOST) SILVER BULLET OF AUTOMATED RECONCILIATION About Renata: As the Senior Product Manager for Financial Control Solutions at Fiserv, Renata Sheyner engages with clients across industries to understand their internal compliance, risk management and financial control needs to drive strategic innovation. www.fiserv.com/index.aspx