Insurance noodle

Cognitive surplus has been recently proven to be a gold mine for a collection of different departments. Don’t you think it’s about time you learnt to benefit from this within your finance department as well?

Go beyond the apparent and obvious
All of the typical financial processes that most companies will utilise to drive growth are fairly obvious these include: cutting into the bottom line, maximizing revenues at the top line, and calculating the return on investment (ROI) for any new investment opportunities.

But if you can make ‘innovation time’, in conjunction with financial analysis, you will find that you are given a chance to look at less traditional levers to drive growth within your department.

Not a very exciting task
Ensuring that you are given real time away from the stress of daily tasks will eventually prove to be an invaluable exercise. Real time allows you and your department time to reflect and allow you analyse the performance of your finance department within the past versus the demands, your deliveries and performance of today. By reaching into and exploring your cognitive surplus, you and your colleagues could discover areas that are limiting, and which could limit your financial performance tomorrow. By taken a look at these limits you and your department can explore alternative solutions to help drive growth and increase the overall innovation of your company.

With your financial performance analysis in situ and a collection of innovative ideas in hand you’ll be able to better forecast and set up departmental budgets, whilst providing a firm foundation from which you are able to review any innovative concepts to vary the business structure serving to help alter the performance/cost ratio in a positive direction.

Want a push towards the right direction
Want a sensible push towards the right direction, which will help you greatly improve the performance of your finance department?

You probably have an identical gut feeling that was brought to our consciousness by an accounting survey of the financial close process: only 28 % finance employees trust the reported numbers within the month end financial close making historical account analysis an even more arduous task.

Financial Reconciliation software can make the whole financial close process quicker and more economical by the complete integration of automatic account reconciliation with automated approval workflows. With the utilization of summary dashboards, account reconciliation software makes strict compliance the quality standard for your team, whilst at the same time executives are often accurately kept within the loop with drill-down reports at the press of a button.

You can conjointly do away with binders and build your historical analysis faster and easier with a completely digital archive. Although storing all monthly close reports in binders may provide that old-fashioned feel of security, however that feeling can be misleading. Using binders to archive can in the long run prove more of a hindrance than a help. Problems that can arise are:
Which binder is all the information archived in? This issue can further be compounded with the problem of physical space required to store all of your company binders.

Where in the binder is it? Generally binders over time become too hefty to go through. So whether you’re working with binders or spreadsheets maintaining that control and overview are a top priority. At any moment, you need to have all documentation in place and to understand the status of every person and every task. Financial Reconciliation software can help you to streamline and digitize your monthly financial close process. Whilst allowing you to replace cumbersome spreadsheets and full binders with an up-to-date real-time overview of the entire balance sheet reconciliation process.

Taking all of the above into account what’s more, due to all of these efficiencies financial reconciliation software will actually help you facilitate to make ‘innovation time’ within the financial department, serving to create a virtuous cycle of enhancements and innovations with in your department.

With all of these helpful features and more it isn’t hard to ascertain how using financial reconciliation software will greatly utilise your cognitive surplus and help streamline your finance department helping your business grow.

Help drive innovation in your finance department with the help of Adramatch, Adramatch provide accounting and financial reconciliation software to help boost your finance department.

From Excel to excellence for the month-end close reconciliation process.

As a financial accounting professional, it is almost certain you will have been using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets during the month end close process. It is also extremely likely you will have experienced problems with them too!

Over the last thirty-odd years, spreadsheets have become a mainstay in finance departments, used for all sorts of tasks, from reconciliation to reporting and everything in between. Despite their popularity with finance staff, they still pose a massive margin for error. The expected error rate when reconciling with spreadsheets is 0.8-1.8% and though this may seem small, for a company with a $1m turnover this represents a risk of $80,000-$180,000.

What’s more, the damage done can also affect public perception and trust in your brand, leading to less tangible but just as dangerous losses.

Is it possible to move away from spreadsheets?

For smaller businesses, the number of accounts needing to be reconciled is relatively small, so it makes sense for smaller businesses to continue using a combination of spreadsheets and QuickBooks. In turn, the team that manages the financial close process will also be relatively small, perhaps just one or two finance staff, so there is also less room for data handling errors.

However, as the number of accounts to reconcile grows and the team managing your monthly close process is expanded, errors can easily worm their way in to the reconciliation process. Once a business has grown, it makes sense to move away from Excel spreadsheets and QuickBooks, particularly for tasks like reconciling. At its capacity, the finance department of a large organisation can generate up to five hundred spreadsheets a month – so it’s easy to see how errors and duplications can creep in.

Will the finance department ever rid themselves of Excel spreadsheets completely?

It seems unlikely that Excel spreadsheets will disappear from the finance department completely; admittedly, they are still a really useful tool for auditing, even for very large businesses (of 1,000+ headcounts) and they will probably remain the go-to program of choice for creating graphs and charts.

However, businesses that are managing to grow and are serious about both productivity and regulatory compliance will likely move their reconciliation and monthly close process to specialist programs, as opposed to makeshift spreadsheets. Especially as the need for advanced reporting and intuitive financial analysis expands beyond the capabilities of Excel.

Businesses who are serious about both productivity and regulatory compliance should look to specialist reconciliation software packages from Adramatch