Imagine An Account Reconciliation Quality Buzzer
Wouldn’t it be great to work on a project that has guidelines or a system of checks and balances in place that prevent you from submitting mediocre work?
This struck me as I was playing Operation with my son. It’s the game where you use metal tweezers to extract items from the game board. If you touch the side of the cavity where you are performing your extraction, a startlingly loud buzz occurs.
Similar to all professions, accounting has levels of greatness. Take reconciliations for example. Not only are many companies struggling to ensure that all accounts are reconciled properly with respect to timeliness, supporting documents, and evidence of review, but many companies are struggling to ensure that all accounts are even reconciled.
Financial teams are lucky as they can buy control through automation. However, only in special cases can they buy the ability to enforce quality.
Most account reconciliation automation tools should enable accounting teams to leave no account unreconciled because of a direct connection with the general ledger system. When it comes to quality, I can only speak for ART, the account reconciliation automation tool from SkyStem.
ART helps account reconciliation preparers submit quality work by automatically scoring the reconciliation based on the deadlines and what is submitted as part of the reconciliation. There are ten risk- mitigating metrics. The preparer sees the score and has the opportunity to rectify the reconciliation and even comment on each metric prior to submitting it for review. Not all ten have to be used and they can be customized.
For those of us who spend way too much time reviewing reconciliations and who tire quickly of the back and forth of review notes, ART’s reconciliation quality score acts like a soothing, time-saving buzzer.
See how ART can help improve your account reconciliation quality here.