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Tips for Cleaning up Reconciliations
 Annette Grotz
Are you going to lose out on the opportunity to bring a little spring cleaning into your monthly financial processes and continue with the same tired and inefficient manual reconciliations?
Spring is a good time to examine your processes to see what can be eliminated, what can be fixed and what should be added.
Eliminations include overlapping steps in the account reconciliations process. A good example here is a preparer having to review the reviewer’s work, ensuring all reconciliations have been signed and dated. (ART, SkyStem’s account reconciliation automation tool, makes signing and dating a mandatory step.)
A good candidate for darning (to mend or span a gap) would be reconciling to the incorrect amount. Late entries wreak havoc on efficiency and having to go through all of the accounts to see which were affected, is like going through all of your socks after having organized them and put them away to see which have holes. (ART pulls in the updated GL balance whenever you want it. It also points out the accounts affected by new balances – even if they have been reconciled.)
If your month-end close is full of formula-ridden Excel spreadsheets and loosely kept supporting documents, it will not matter how many color coded binders you have, your audit is unlikely to sparkle. (ART helps you improve controls and prevent potential spreadsheet errors while providing a central repository in which to house your supporting documents.)
Implementing ART is a quick and painless way to clean up your account reconciliation and month-end close processes. Read about this customer's easy implementation.
Pained to hear the reconciliation process many accountants endure each month, Jenn created a list of ten ways to freshen up account reconciliations. Read more >>>
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