The Benefits of Automated Assets and Liabilities Reconciliation

Assets and Liabilities Reconciliation

Asset and liability reconciliations are vital financial processes employed by accounting and finance teams to guarantee accuracy and uniformity of their financial records. Similar to other reconciliations, accounting reconciliation, balance sheet reconciliation, and financial reconciliation of assets and liabilities reconciliation with an organization’s general ledger involves comparing and confirming the balances of assets and liabilities with external sources or documents to identify any discrepancies or mistakes.

At Savant, many of our customers are responsible for executing a month end asset and liability reconciliation to meet the stringent requirements of their continuous audit throughout the year. Typically, accounting teams are required to compare their general ledgers to their finance accounts to satisfy the month close requirements of external auditors.

The Pain of Manual Process

These strenuous financial processes are time consuming and error inducing. According to most studies, nearly 90% of spreadsheets and workbooks contain errors. Repeating the same manual process each week or month means high error rates, audit nightmares and lots of time wasted.

That’s why many modern finance teams are using analytics automation platforms like Savant. With analytics automation, finance teams can automate repeat work, ensure accurate results and provide a detailed audit trail.

Let’s review how one leading company’s finance team modernized their asset and liability reconciliation processes.

Inefficiencies in Excel

Like many accounting and finance professionals, our customer encountered several inefficiencies before integrating Savant into their financial workflow. Their accounting department was often overwhelmed with challenges while working across multiple Microsoft Excel documents due to the volume of financial records required. The manual nature of data entry, copying and pasting, and referencing complex calculations were prone to error and consumed considerable time. Additionally, the team was unable to meet the audit trail requirements requested by their external auditors forcing them to repeat work and accept a higher level of risk assurance.

Access to Unlimited Financial Data

One of the main difficulties our customer faced was the storage of their financial data essential for the reconciliations in NetSuite. The accounting team was required to manually export reports into various formats from NetSuite. Not only was this a tedious task for the team, but due to the manual filters that needed to be configured, management recognized that team members were using different datasets with different reporting cutoffs.

Savant’s NetSuite connector made it simple for the accounting team to quickly access massive quantities of live and precise data. The customer’s accounting department configured NetSuite datasets in their Savant tenant that allowed analysts across the organization to be certain they were using complete, accurate, and up-to-date data. The NetSuite connector in Savant continues t allow the accounting and finance departments to build custom reports and refine other month-end processes that necessitate general ledger information.

Comparing Results

The meticulous task of auditing and reconciliation required cross-referencing the company’s NetSuite general ledger data with bank records. This additional financial reconciliation safeguarded the accuracy and integrity of financial information. In the past, the challenge stemmed from manual handling of financial information in PDF files and Microsoft Excel workbooks. However, the accounting department can now utilize Savant’s NetSuite connector in conjunction with our Generic API connector that was configured directly to our customer’s bank records.

This approach allowed a seamless and easy to manage combination of general ledger asset and liability data from NetSuite with the bank’s transaction records. Savant’s Join tool allows users to define a primary table in order to isolate records between the general ledger and bank records that are not found in the other. The Savant Join tool also eliminated the laborious task of troubleshooting the accounting team faced using VLOOKUPS() and SUMIFS(). Rather, after joining the datasets together they were able to use simple mathematical calculations to uncover anomalies and discrepancies between the data sources.

Automated Reconciliation

Accountants and financial professionals generally accept that the end of their financial periods come with long days and sleepless nights. However, Savant’s built-in historical runs allows accounting and finance teams to quickly and conveniently access historical executions and historical data to present to their external auditors throughout year-end financial audits. As well, the historical runs window provides managerial transparency and visibility into workflow execution and process logic employed in various analytical processes across the organization.

Take Aways

Savant makes it easy to provide analysts throughout an organization with the data they need to make informed decisions with exact and timely data. One of the greatest improvements to our customer’s organization as a whole after adopting Savant was the ability for management to provide all of it’s analysts with accurate and prompt financial data. Rather than different teams and departments using different cutoffs and accounts, now analysts throughout the organization are reassured that their Savant datasets they are building custom reports from are accurate and enable the most effective and prompt decisions to be taken. Monthly close, month end, and monthly close processes are all automated with Savant, providing analysts with the assurance that their assets and liabilities are reconciled properly.

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Getting Started

Savant offers quick start solution templates to help get you started. Check out our Assets and Liabilities solution and get automating in minutes!

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