Accounting Reconciliation

Revolutionizing Recs: Inside the Exciting New Updates to FloQast Reconciliation Management

Mar 27, 2024 Jaysen Dyal

For a profession that digests a volume of data that many others might not think possible, the onus on accountants to ensure accuracy consistently can seem daunting. Never mind that thousands of data sets were entered and analyzed without a hitch — it’s always the one that gets away and can get someone in trouble. 

But suppose you look at how valuable the compilation and analysis of these figures can be. In that case, it’s really no wonder why accidentally hitting a four instead of a five can be so alarming. Businesses survive on information, and any indication of an emerging trend can mean the difference between staying afloat, exceeding expectations, or thriving. 

This is, of course, precisely why reconciliations are so core to the accounting function. A few weeks ago, we looked at the specific challenges surrounding the reconciliation process.

Today, however, we’re proud to announce some exciting new updates our team of former accountants purpose-built to overcome the myriad challenges surrounding how recs are approached. Let’s take a look.

Reconciliations Then vs. Now

If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at last week’s post, I’ll do you a solid. There are two major areas for concern surrounding how recs are managed:

  1. Organization and visibility
  2. Accuracy

Those two are pretty self-explanatory. Accounting teams can be remarkably siloed, considering the number of moving parts and responsibilities. On any given day, accounting teams take on an ocean of tasks, with many not necessitating any communication between team members. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can contribute to a major inefficiency accounting teams face today: A lack of transparency. Teams need help to track the status of reconciliations and allocate resources effectively, leading to inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Without a centralized platform for monitoring progress, missteps are inevitable.

Ditto for accuracy — we already discussed that above, so let’s not revisit the recurring nightmare of fat-fingering a key back when we were lonely staff auditors.

With today’s news, FloQast Reconciliation Management can now drive the reconciliation process in a much more organized manner, helping teams centralize management and streamline communication, all while helping them avoid the risk of material misstatements, in order to execute a faster, more accurate Close, consistently. 

Standardization

Different reconciliations require different approaches With the FloQast Reconciliation Management solution, controllers can capture the reconciliation strategy and approach to address the risks unique to each account. This allows teams to capture best practices to ensure consistency and change processes as their organization scales. Additionally, with Audit Reports, managers can track changes to processes, noting who made a change and the timing, ensuring strategy remains aligned with execution.

Flexibility

Not all reconciliations are handled the same. FloQast Reconciliation Management is designed to allow teams to choose the most effective method for each account, whether supporting manual reviews in a spreadsheet or full automation leveraging FloQast’s AI-driven AutoRec features. 

Now, teams can automate bank and clearing accounts with high transaction volumes and risk for fraud with FloQast AI-Assisted AutoRec Matching — saving teams hours or even days each month, automating the matching of thousands of transactions and identifying exceptions in just minutes. 

Accuracy

And now we’ve come back to accuracy. Simply put: Not all recs tie out. Some are fully understood items that need a correction in the general ledger, while others require further investigation outside of the Close process. FloQast Reconciling Items tracks timing or unknown errors to ensure that all reconciling items are recorded, tracked, and managed in one place, giving reviewers greater visibility into the age and materiality of each item, as well as a document audit trail. 

Remember those last few words: They’re foreshadowing. 

Insights

The reconciliation process is vitally important to business, so that means numerous stakeholders who need to be updated on status. FloQast Business Intelligence API allows teams to integrate FloQast workflow data into business intelligence tools for heightened visibility into statuses, helping teams optimize processes over time with data-backed decisions.

Audit Readiness

Remember this? 

“FloQast Reconciling Items tracks timing or unknown errors to ensure that all reconciling items are recorded, tracked, and managed in one place, giving reviewers greater visibility into the age and materiality of each item, as well as a document audit trail.”

Yeah, I copied and pasted it from above. But that’s because it’s important! FloQast Reconciliation Management allows teams to capture all evidence to support the audit when they are doing the work, not when they’re scrambling for the audit while, well, still doing the work.

Teams can give auditors read-only access to the explanations for reconciling items and illustrate evidence for controls. This decreases the audit burden on the accountants while keeping auditors happy with the organization of it all. Who doesn’t love a smooth audit!?

The Bottom Line 

We talk a lot about being a company of former accountants, but it’s true. Every product enhancement is accountant-driven, with input along the way from active accountants and FloQast users to fine-tune the tools to make sure they’re actually providing value for the troops on the ground. 

We’re thrilled about the latest set of enhancements to FloQast Reconciliation Management, and hope you are too!

See the new AI-enhanced automation and robust API integrations in FloQast Reconciliation Management for yourself