Accounting

3 Ways Account Reconciliation Software Can Help Your Accounting Team

Jun 17, 2019 John Siegel

Teamwork isn’t easy work if you aren’t all on the same page, and let’s be honest: Is your whole team ever really on the same page?

For accounting teams in particular, structure and communication are critical for operating as efficiently as possible. That’s what we created FloQast to do — to serve as a facilitator for busy accounting teams to eliminate roadblocks, improve communications, and empower team leaders to correctly allocate resources to streamline the month-end close process.

But while this new level of transparency benefits organizations from the data-entry professionals to the C-Suite, one task in particular haunts accountants heavily involved in the month-end close: Manually reconciling transactions, a process that takes many hours — and often days — of tedious, highly-repetitive work.

Thankfully, there’s a solution in place. Using artificial intelligence, account reconciliation software can match hundreds of thousands of transactions in mere moments, allowing busy accounting teams to focus on more value-added projects while providing executives peace of mind that nothing is falling through the cracks.

Here’s how it works:

Get Time Back on Your Calendar

As the Accounting Coordinator for Pennsylvania-based education publisher Demme Learning, Joel Theimer would allocate a handful of days each month for reconciliations. When the company had the opportunity to test out FloQast’s new account reconciliation software — FloQast Matching — Theimer admitted he was excited to have an aid in the highly-laborious process. Once he ran Matching for the first time, however, Theimer was blown away.

“Setup was extremely easy. When I ran Matching for the first time, I was surprised to find that the tool matched 97 percent for me right away.”

Have Peace of Mind

Regardless of the size of a business and its accounting and finance teams, bandwidth often becomes an issue.

In Demme Learning’s case, the time saved by utilizing account reconciliation software was great — but the confidence the company had that the software was consistently delivering accurate results provided them something you can’t put a price tag on: Peace of mind.

“It was a very, very manual process, just matching this transaction to that transaction, and there could be thousands of lines in each file,” said Theimer. “Now, I’m comfortable that Matching won’t miss a digit. It’s not going to transpose numbers and match something that it shouldn’t, where my eyes just running over a file might.”

More Room to Operate

Let’s face it: The process of manually reconciling transactions was never the most efficient of processes. Aside from the time and energy required, the room for error is simply unacceptable. But what other way was there?

Now flush with results he could trust and time back on his calendar, Theimer said that the hours previously allocated for reconciliations are going toward something new: Taking a deeper dive into the results.

“We’re taking that time we spent conducting the close to actually analyze it,” he said. “We’re looking more closely at the numbers and being able to do more reporting to management. We’re not just reporting the results anymore; now we’re looking deeper into what the results actually mean.”

The future of accounting is here. Learn how AI is a gamechanger for finance and accounting teams