Month End.
If those two words make you feel uneasy, then it’s time to embrace technology to optimise your workload.
Month end is a mountain that all finance teams face. While there’s no way to avoid it, automation can help streamline the process and save you significant time.
If you’ve been dragging yourself through each month end with manual processes, read on to discover how automation can reduce your closing time by up to 79%.
Close The Books Survey
According to Sage’s Close the Books Survey, finance teams spend an average of 7 working days closing the books each month – that’s a staggering 3 months each year.
The survey also revealed that journal entries, bank reconciliation and reviewing transactions are the three most time-consuming tasks during month end.
56% of respondents use manual processes to review transactions for anomalies or inaccuracies.
51% of respondents lack automation for journal entries.
47% of finance teams lack the automation required to accelerate bank reconciliations.
Let’s explore how automation can address these 3 areas.
1. Journal Entries
Ensuring all your transactions and accruals have been recorded at month end can take up a lot of time. If you forget to post something, then it can lead to inaccurate financial statements and extra work down the line.
When you’re battling against trying to get things right and completing tasks on time, this puts significant strain on your team.
Automation can help by setting up some journals and accruals to post automatically and is especially handy for recurring transactions, such as accrued expenses and depreciation.
This reduces the time spent on journal entries and minimises errors.
2. Financial Reconciliation
Reconciling your cash accounts, balance sheets and inter-company accounts is one of the most time-consuming month-end tasks. Painstakingly going through your books and cross-referencing them with bank statements is an outdated way of reconciling your accounts.
Many businesses are now automating this process to save valuable time.
A common way to automate bank reconciliation is by using bank feeds to automatically feed data from your bank into your accounting system and setting up matching rules to automatically match transactions.
3. Reviewing Transactions
It’s not surprising that manually checking for discrepancies takes up a lot of time. Staring at numbers for too long also makes it more likely that you’ll miss something you should’ve picked up.
Manually reviewing transactions is especially difficult to manage for growing businesses with an increasing number of transactions that need to be reviewed each month.
Modern accounting solutions have built-in functionalities that can keep an eye out for any potential mistakes and flag them for your review. Meaning you don’t have to spend large amounts of time checking everything, but you’re alerted to anything that requires your attention.
This takes the manual work out of catching errors, so you can get them resolved in less time.
Key Benefits
When your month end process consists of mostly manual work, this can hinder the organization’s growth.
As the business expands its services, locations or markets, the issue becomes bigger too. Refining your month end processes now and utilising automation prepares you for future growth.
Benefits of automating your month end close:
- Reduce the risk of human error: Decrease mistakes from manual processing and the extra work required to fix issues.
- Reliable and trustworthy data: Gain confidence in the financial statements and data you provide to stakeholders and auditors.
- Free up valuable time and resources: Spend less time closing the books and more time on rewarding tasks and personal development.
- Gain deeper insights from your data: Spend more time analysing data, generating actionable insights and refining processes.
Sage Intacct: Your Automation Partner
Unchain your team from manual month end tasks with Sage Intacct, the cloud native accounting solution built for mid-sized and growing businesses.
Sage Intacct offers a wealth of automation features to free you from manual and repetitive tasks.
Key features include:
- General Ledger outlier detection
- Inter-entity transactions
- Invoicing and billing
- Accounts Payable workflows
- Advanced reporting tools
- Multi-entity consolidations
- Automated allocations
- Fixed assets management
- Revenue recognition
- Custom dashboards
Not only can Intacct speed up your month end close, but it can also improve efficiency and accuracy throughout the month. Find out more about Sage Intacct here.
Get in Touch
If you’re struggling with similar challenges, embrace technology to take the manual graft out of your month end. To learn more about how Sage Intacct can make your job easier while driving the business forward, get in touch with our team.
To speak to a member of the team, please complete the enquiry form on this page.
