It enables us to maintain an accurate position of our cash management at all times. It has freed up staff time so that we are not just focused on matching and resolving exceptions.
Owned by their members, the Co-operative is a special type of business that is seen as the cornerstone of communities across the UK. Initiatives such as raising over £58 million since 2020 for local causes and producing clear nutrition labels on all their food play a huge role in this. They also go to show that the Co-operative recognises the importance of accurate numbers. No matter whether it is donations to charities, calories, the money in their tills, or the savings of their customers in their banks, the Co-operative deals with a lot of numbers every day.
However, with the sources of their payments becoming more diverse and, in turn, their volumes increasing, the pressure upon their finance teams to ensure accuracy began to grow in 2008. As the Co-operative's business evolved, the need emerged for its financial infrastructure to follow suit.
The solution
Accepting payments from the likes of cash, credit cards, cheques, PayPoint, and more meant that the Co-operative is exposed to various streams of revenue, all of which process at different speeds. Nevertheless, accuracy must be maintained at all times.
In addition, different arms of the Co-operative operate different finance procedures due to their business function. For instance, the Co-operative Funeral Care regularly handles single disbursements or cheques that relate to multiple invoices and payments, each of which must still be reconciled separately.
“The size of the reconciliation task that we face on a daily basis means that we need an efficient, accurate solution to manage our ledger and disbursement reconciliations, and that is what we get. Aurum takes a complex task and makes it simple for us to manage.”
Vicky Reaney, Banking and Administration Manager
As such, to ensure they always have an accurate cash position, the Co-operative required a comprehensive reconciliation solution. One that could handle different types of reconciliation, one that could provide the APIs they required, one that could reconcile high volumes of transactions at speed, and one that could intelligently match one to many transactions. With so many requirements, they turned to the one solution that has been the preferred choice for firms all over the world – Aurum.
The results
With Aurum installed and training completed on-site, the Central England Co-operative Finance Team was given the best start to using their new solution. Yet once the Co-operative loaded up Aurum for the first time, the Aurum Solutions team's hands-on approach swiftly gave way to what they were hoping for—automation.
Everything from ingesting and transforming files to reconciling transactions all became automated thanks to a combination of Aurum’s bespoke scripting, APIs, and powerful matching engine.
“My colleagues and I perform a number of different reconciliations each week. It helps us match the bulk of our transactions using auto-match and suggest-match rules. We can quickly look at any exceptions and write off small discrepancies. Without Aurum Solutions’ platform, it would take a long time to match and settle the volume of transactions that we have, which run into the thousands.”
Leanne Bean, Senior Banking Administrator
With immense time savings being realised through automating data handling and reconciliation, Aurum leaves the finance team at the Co-operative merely with exception management to do themselves. Yet even this is supported by Aurum.
For instance, should data from a bank statement not marry up with that in the Co-operative's Agresso General Ledger system, rules set by the team automatically take hold. An example of this is that if a discrepancy is below a certain value, the difference is written off and posted back to the general ledger.
Ultimately, quicker reconciliation, paired with accurate ledger updates leaves the Central England Co-operative Finance Team secure in the knowledge that they always have an accurate cash position, drastically reducing their financial risk.
“The main benefit that we get from Aurum is the time saved in managing our diverse reconciliations. It enables us to maintain an accurate position of our cash management at all times which helps minimise our financial risk.”
Leanne Bean, Senior Banking Administrator
The impact of this cannot be understated given the importance of accurate financial insights to steer a business forward, especially one like the Co-operative that is owned by its members. In fact, the future is another reason why Aurum was chosen as the Co-operative's reconciliation software of choice. With the ability to scale as transaction volumes increase and possessing a large bank of APIs, their finance team can rest easy, knowing that Aurum will be able to cope with future demand. As a reflection of this confidence, they are already planning to reconcile additional accounts through Aurum.
“It has freed up staff time so that we are not just focused on matching and resolving exceptions, which means that as a department, we can cope better with our growing business volumes.”
Leanne Bean, Senior Banking Administrator
However, it is worth noting that finance is also as much about looking backwards as it is looking forward. This too is acknowledged by Aurum. Offering a highly-customisable search functionality and the automatic production of complete audit trails, Leanne and her peers can now rely on Aurum to quickly provide them with any historic intel that they, certain branches, or even auditors might need.
“The ability to quickly and accurately search for specific cheques is invaluable in responding to branch queries regarding unpresented cheques for example. This helps to minimise our exposure to unbanked items. The audit trail is invaluable too as we can see exactly which transactions have been matched and where differences were created.”
Leanne Bean, Senior Banking Administrator, Central England Co-operative
Overall, no matter whether it is the software itself which Leanne describes as “very easy to use and straightforward to train new users on”, or the “highly responsive” Aurum Solutions support team, Leanne “would recommend Aurum to other co-operatives or businesses that need to manage complex reconciliations with multiple transaction types".
