At Oracle we are passionate about automating finance and accounting. We love it, and we’re proud that we love it. And not just in our product development organization. Our enthusiasm permeates our entire business. Did you know that Oracle is setting records for the fastest close on the S&P 500? 

So, we take it as a given that account reconciliation is an essential aspect of governance, central to ensuring visibility into financial health. Yet, we still find organizations primarily (or even entirely) using spreadsheets for this critical process. One customer summed it up this way, “We have billions of dollars across our balance sheet, and we used to manage its accuracy entirely using spreadsheets. That made our CFO very nervous.”  

The problems as we see them

That CFO was right to be nervous. There are numerous risks and downsides to a manual approach.  Two of the most obvious are:

  • Inaccuracy: Since a precise understanding of assets and liabilities across the balance sheet is critical to a company’s decision making, it should not depend on a manual, error-prone process. 
  • Cost: Manual processes are very expensive once the impact of errors and additional audit costs are tallied. Further, they require extra people doing repetitive tasks, which increases overhead, decreases job satisfaction, and can fuel attrition.

Half-baked automation isn’t the answer

Some try deploying home-grown tools or point solutions to address these issues. While better than spreadsheets, this approach won’t put the CFO’s mind at ease, control costs, or eliminate inaccuracies. Customers who have gone down this road report ongoing challenges, including:

  • Inconsistencies across accounting applications and reconciliation tools, requiring ongoing manual validations.
  • Expensive and complex integrations with financial management applications. This turns out to be a recurring issue as periodic upgrades trigger reintegration projects.
  • Lower productivity as finance pros are forced to switch between multiple applications. This is especially difficult when working through exception approvals.
  • Higher TCO attributable to managing more applications than is necessary.

A simple, effective alternative for Fusion Apps ERP customers

Customers using Oracle Fusion Cloud Financial Management have a unique opportunity to improve account reconciliation by also using Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM Account Reconciliation. The combination offers capabilities that ensure the applications work together seamlessly for finance and accounting teams, including:

  • Transaction matching for high-volume and complex reconciliations that ensures exceptions are highlighted and resolved throughout the quarter. This frees up time at period end for more important, value-added tasks.
  • Purpose-built reconciliation formats that automatically detect low-risk accounts and reconcile the balances for faster time to close.
  • Prebuilt, native integration between applications that ensures a fast and smooth implementation and a consistent user experience. Since we are responsible for the integrations, they don’t break after each quarterly update.

Even if you’re only using Oracle Financial Management in part of your business, your entire organization can still benefit from adding Oracle Account Reconciliation as a common service that integrates with Oracle and non-Oracle applications. That’s because it:

  • Eliminates the need to add point solutions, providing long-term cost, complexity, and security advantages.
  • Creates a path toward an EPM suite that addresses the full range of enterprise needs, including capabilities that support heterogenous financial systems (e.g., Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Data Management and Financial Consolidation and Close).
  • Reduces training and other adoption hurdles with a common user experience.

Together, Oracle Financial Management and Account Reconciliation deliver dramatically higher levels of automation and visibility. And it’s much more productive for finance professionals, especially during crunch time at quarter end.

Summing up

If any part of your business is using Oracle Financial Management, Oracle EPM’s Account Reconciliation can help you manage the balance sheet certification process with confidence. It will enable you to close faster, improve financial statement accuracy, and strengthen internal controls and compliance. You’ll also run more efficiently, lower technology costs, and improve the job satisfaction of your finance pros. What’s not to love about that?

Additional resources

Here are some additional resources to help you learn more about Oracle Account Reconciliation:

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