Enabling the Automation of Account Reconciliation and Accelerating the Financial Close Process

Automation is becoming widespread as businesses in a highly digitalised environment increasingly process high amounts of transactions. The advent of the E-commerce age means most companies process thousands of daily transactions. 

Retail E-commerce sales worldwide amounted to US$5.2 trillion in 2021 and are expected to grow by 56% and reach US$8.1 trillion in 2026. Manual methods of managing financial processes are no longer viable options for businesses. 

As the rate of digital transformation picks up around the globe, businesses at the forefront of their industry are adopting industry-leading cloud solutions. Software such as cloud enterprise resource planning (ERPs) can help with the automation of critical financial processes and bring about operational efficiencies. 

However, the complexities of managing hundreds of thousands of transactions mean businesses need to adapt best-of-breed solutions and integrate them with their cloud ERP systems to enable automation in scale and operate optimally. 

For instance, industry-leading cloud ERP systems such as Oracle NetSuite cloud ERP have helped thousands of companies worldwide manage their business processes efficiently and unlock key insights for business growth. Cloud ERP systems also provide businesses with an unprecedented, real-time view of their finances and business processes.

However, as identified in a recent joint study by BlackLine and IDG, the robust functionality of cloud ERP systems can be further enhanced beyond financial processes to focus on continued growth. 

Advanced cloud accounting solutions available in the market easily integrate with cloud ERPs to help its users to automate the extraction of data out of their system and perform reconciliation and close activities. 

As is expected of big companies handling high volumes of transactions, it is often the case that multiple users work on each spreadsheet which then leads to a higher probability of human errors, and data duplications. 

“When you’re dealing with high volumes of matching transactions from multiple sources, rework, errors, and risk exposure are inevitable,” says Sonia Chu, senior product marketing manager at BlackLine.

Financial processes automation solutions such as BlackLine, complement the robust application programming interface (API) capabilities of cloud ERP systems such as Oracle NetSuite, to provide businesses with a single source of truth that acts as a central repository for them to perform accounting work. 

Advanced cloud accounting solutions such as BlackLine, when integrated with cloud ERPs automate the process of importing and formatting financial data, in addition to standardising reconciliations with “predesigned templates, auto certification, and rules-based approval processes that F&A can deploy and customize without IT help”.

In organisations on a high growth trajectory, the precious time of finance and accounting professionals should not be wasted on manually managing tedious accounting processes.

Cloud accounting solutions such as BlackLine complement the robust functionalities offered by cloud ERP systems. This allows finance and accounting professionals to focus on unlocking critical insights for growth.

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