Is This the End for Spreadsheet Based Reconciliation Certification, Tracking, Control and Compliance?

Since the well publicised events surrounding the collapse of Barings Bank, Enron, WorldCom, and other high-profile financial disasters – both in the US and internationally - an increasing array of legislation has been put in place to try to mitigate the future risk of a repeat of these catastrophic (in the business context) events.

In the US, the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 demanded a much greater level of accountability for Directors and in the UK, similar demands of business stakeholders were made through the Combined Code on Corporate Governance originally published in 1998 (revised 2003) and in the revised Companies Act 2006.

The result has been a significant increase in corporate cost, both in terms of in-house operational and management costs as well as external Audit, Consultancy and other specialist fees to achieve and maintain compliance. A substantial portion of this cost has been as a result of defining and implementing additional, time-consuming (and often manual), control processes, review structures, and certification processes all geared toward the provision of documentary evidence of control around the processes organisations already had in place. Having achieved compliance first time round, the number of organisations electing to replace these manual control processes with technological, best of breed, process automation and improvement tools has increased significantly. Few more so than in the area of GL account control, reconciliation and certification.

Today, the vast majority of organisations world-wide still rely heavily on (Excel) Spreadsheets to manage this critical process. Spreadsheets are used to accept a download of accounts from the GL; to track responsibility for ownership of the reconciliation and review; to track the completion of the reconciliation, review, and sometimes Approval, of each reconciliation; to track queries (open reconciling items); and to attempt to aggregate the value and categorisation of those open reconciling items for the purposes of assessing materiality.

Specialist (Web-based) tools for the automation of the GL account certification process have been developed (resulting in the elimination of Spreadsheets from the process). These tools are comprehensive, encompassing reconciliation preparation, review/approval, quality assurance testing (Audit), aggregation of open reconciling items, reporting and improved program management. The solutions are starting to make major inroads in helping organisations with thousands (to hundreds of thousands) of GL accounts to finally take complete control of the process - whilst driving real monetary benefit through efficiency and time-saving at the same time as ensuring compliance.

Organisations with a distributed National or International infrastructure are particularly well suited to this type of Web-based technology that provides for global visibility into the status of the reconciliation program.

For more information contact Ted Sparrey.