[KJ]

Just trying to get some ideas how you can make some recon self-balancing. Anyone who works for accounting firm and have used any systems that can reduce manual work and basically does self-balancing recon. Or how you have helped your company to reduce manual work?

FAR - August 2016
AUD - September 2016
REG - October 2016
BEC - November 2016

Remember: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

[Tim]

I mean reconciliation is just matching one set of data against another. So you would just output journal entries that offset the differences between the data in the accounting system and the data you're validating against. You can easily just do this in excel where all you need to do is paste the data into your spreadsheet then upload the journal entry it creates to the accounting system. Pretty simple, but can get complicated when dealing with large numbers of accounts, many statement files, weird formatting issues, etc.

Excel is a pretty powerful tool and most people in private accounting barely scratch the surface in what it can do from what I've experienced. There's also the issue where a lot of senior management are old-fogeys that don't like or trust technology so they don't want you to change the way it's been done forever even if it would be a drastic improvement.

[KJ]

@Tim. Thanks for your insight. Definitely dealing with large number of accounts so excel does not always work as you mentioned above with formatting issues, etc. I work in Banking industry so we work with large amount of accounts/transactions. Cloud-based accounting system is a good way to deal with this kind of problem I reckon.

FAR - August 2016
AUD - September 2016
REG - October 2016
BEC - November 2016

Remember: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

[Tim]

I worked at Kroger which, if not familiar, is a supermarket chain operating in like 40 states. The banking accounting department used a program to reconcile accounts and book differences in those accounts to our accounting system. It required statements to be loaded in a particular format, though, and then some minor setup in the program to know what it was looking for. The lottery statements were also reconciled using this program and that's where I came in. There were about 100 different statement files from the various states and different chains we had in those states. Before I came along they were taking those statements that the states provided and manually opening each one and reformatting them, saving them to multiple locations, etc. in order to make them readable by the reconiliation program. I ended up writing an excel macro (basically a program within excel) that did all of this automatically. So what was originally a 5+ hour extremely monotonous task would be completed in about 15 minutes with one click of a button. It only took that long to run because the file saving on the network was slow. This had to be done every week.

[KJ]

@Tim, that is cool. Yes, I have worked on macros before but not at my current job because did not had to. But that is good information, appreciate it!

FAR - August 2016
AUD - September 2016
REG - October 2016
BEC - November 2016

Remember: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

[Author]

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