Automated reconciliation: a game changer

Simplifying financial reconciliation: the power of automation

Every day, billions of transactions take place between merchants, financial services, payment providers and more. They all have their share of transactions to handle and are all responsible to one another to make sure that their numbers add up. To guarantee this, reconciliation must take place.

However, as ever in our modern world, what was once a simple task, is now anything but. Growing volume and increasing complexity of transactions, along with the addition of more regulations regarding them, have made reconciliation an arduous task for many financial teams. Yet this is not the case for all of them. For those with automated reconciliation software, it is a very different story.

If you’ve been feeling the pains of manual reconciliation for too long, this blog is here to share with you how automated reconciliation can be the catalyst you need to transform your labored financial processes.

What is automated reconciliation?

Automated reconciliation does what it says on the tin and much more – it reconciles multiple transactions in seconds to divide those which match from those which don’t. What else it achieves is best summarised by how it impacts various professionals directly.

Who benefits from automated reconciliation?

It is true that reconciliation is an activity limited to financial teams; however, it has far-reaching ramifications. Financial team members, CFOs, auditors and in fact every other company department can be directly impacted by moving from manual to automated reconciliation. Let’s find out how:

CFOs

Whilst reconciliation might not seem like a CFO’s number one priority, the components of it, and its results are massively important to them. After all, reconciliation verifies a company’s transactions, confirming their numbers.

By looking at reconciliation this way, it becomes clear how important it is to CFOs. Furthermore, when considering the agility required of modern CFO’s, it also becomes evident as to why regular reconciliation is a must have. Simply put, without timely reconciliation, CFOs are left in the unknown to produce forecasts with outdated data.

However, with automated reconciliation software, CFOs can attain reconciliation reports frequently in seconds to make informed decisions. Moreover, beyond confirming which transactions are legitimate, automated reconciliation software such as Aurum also helps address those which aren’t. This is achieved by financial leaders being able to initiate messages directly from flagged exceptions, to notify individual team members that they need investigating. Despite being a simple innovation, this helps CFOs keep their team accountable.

It should also not go unsaid that automated reconciliation is a huge cost saver for CFOs thanks to it freeing up the time and resource of their financial team members. This is an amazing feat considering that at the same time it helps achieve better results, making it a highly desirable investment for any CFO.

Finance teams

Reconciliation is an activity most acutely felt by financial staff like accountants and analysts. Beyond reconciliation, they have various other responsibilities such as dashboarding, protection of client money and validating invoices. Clearly, they are busy people.

However, if reconciliation is conducted manually, financial professionals find themselves wasting masses of time as they scramble to collect data from various sources. And this is just the first action which needs to be taken to initiate reconciliation! Unfortunately, beyond this point, time sapping activities continue to arise, including having to resolve errors which inevitably crop up when manually handling data.

Fortunately, by adopting software like Aurum which can automatically extract, transform and load (ETL) reports from any source, finance teams no longer have to spend time hunting for data, and the risk of handling it incorrectly is removed too. Evidently, freeing finance teams from manual reconciliation (a repetitive, uninspiring task) so that they have more time and mental bandwidth to tackle more stimulating parts of their role is a sure-fire way to boost their morale and productivity.

Auditors

It’s not just internal members who will be grateful for automated reconciliation, so too will auditors. They gain benefits from this innovation not through time saved but thanks to its ability to record every action which is taken whilst reconciling transactions. The likes of Aurum therefore not only automatically reconcile transactions, but they are also fully auditable solutions.

In addition, by being able to reconcile transactions in seconds, finance teams are swiftly alerted to any anomalies by automated reconciliation software. This means that investigation can be initiated promptly, significantly reducing the risk of fraud going undetected. Undeniably, this directly benefits companies but it also assists auditors; reviewing books without any instances of fraud is a lot easier than those which do.

Other company departments

Financial teams might be perceived by certain individuals as merely number crunchers; however, this doesn’t tell the whole story. Once numbers are crunched, they are there to be repurposed. With accurate numbers at their disposal, finance teams can shape the trajectories of every department.

To get to this point, it is therefore fundamental that transactions are reconciled. Without doing so, accurate forecasts cannot be made, and the budgets of internal departments could be completely misled. Although historically forecasts were done once a year, now it is more commonplace for them to be conducted quarterly, and some companies even do them once a week. This shift reflects the increasing volatility of markets, and the need for reconciliation to be done more rapidly to ensure departmental budgets are fit for purpose.

How can automated reconciliation helps finance teams – a recap

Ultimately, automated reconciliation is an investment for financial professionals – it saves them time and gives them the resources to drive initiatives forward. The full list of positive results which it generates, comes in many different forms, so here is a quick recap:

• Save time
  
  
• ETL from various sources
  
  
• Fraud protection
  
  
• Reduce human error
  
  
• Drive initiatives
  
• Boost morale
  
  
• Accurately inform decision-making

The best in class

Investment in software which promises to reconcile millions of transactions in seconds can sound too good to be true. That’s why it is always important to place your trust in a proven solution. At Aurum, for 20 years we have been automating reconciliation for some of the biggest brands.

From Admiral Insurance to Ladbrokes, Co-op to Octopus Investments, we are proud to be their transactional experts. If you’re looking to accelerate your reconciliation, we strongly recommend that you:

• Make sure that your reconciliation really is helping to protect against fraud by opting for our on-premise solution to eradicate the risk of hacks
  
  
• Make sure that you actually can extract, transform and load from every source through our unlimited APIs
  
  
• Make sure that as your transactional volume grows, you are charged no extra costs through our growth guarantee
  
  
• Book a demo with us today