The market study offers insights and recommendations from the field on how companies optimize their reconciliation processes
Standardization and automation are among the most important challenges facing finance departments in companies and organizations worldwide. BARC (Business Application Research Center), together with Dr. Susanne Leitner-Hanetseder, Professor of Accounting at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria in Steyr , have now investigated the special role played by reconciliation and closing processes. Wolters Kluwer, a global leader in professional information, software solutions and services supported the market study and offers the result document free of charge.
The new market study “Account Reconciliation and Closing - The Journey from Excel to Artificial Intelligence“ highlights the associated challenges for the Office of Finance. The report also provides insights into consolidation practices and recommendations for further optimization. The data powering the study was collected in online user survey of finance and business leaders in the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).
Typically, record-to-report processes in particular hold the potential for a significant acceleration of processes through progressive automation. In finance departments, however, manual processes still dominate in many cases and lead to a comparatively high workload, especially around closing dates - time that is lacking for value-adding tasks, such as optimizing data quality. At the same time, classic ERP systems often do not offer the necessary functionality to ensure a high degree of standardization and automation.
In addition, Excel still dominates data preparation and closing processes in many companies. This is not only the case in smaller companies, but often also in individual companies of large, international corporations. At the same time, the results of the study show that satisfaction with the reconciliation and closing processes is often significantly higher in companies that already use dedicated finance solutions. However, the focus has generally been on the pure standardization of recurring, rule-based processes. According to the study findings, opportunities that go well beyond this, for example in the area of machine learning and artificial intelligence, are still little used in the areas of account reconciliation and closing. Overall, companies can still leverage amazing potential savings here.
The new market study “Account Reconciliation and Closing - The Journey from Excel to Artificial Intelligence” by BARC which provides a deeper insight into the topic, is made available by Wolters Kluwer for download here.
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