Have you ever spent an evening at home manually reconciling your company’s accounts? And what’s worse, have you realized too late that some of the documents you need have been left at the office?
Gretchen Sikora, Senior Finance Leader at Dun & Bradstreet, knew the feeling well. Manual and inconsistent reconciliation methods across over 70 reporting entities led to scenarios where Gretchen was frantically flicking through binders even at her son’s baseball tournament.
R2R at D&B is now a different story, which we heard about in a recent webinar. After choosing to automate the reconciliation process with BlackLine technology, D&B:
• Achieves 100% reconciliation compliance each month with completion and approval of over 4500 reconciliations globally
• Saves approximately 10-15 minutes per reconciliation per preparer
And Gretchen “can sleep at night now…”
In the webinar, Gretchen revealed 6 keys to the company’s dramatic transformation:
1. Engage technology ASAP. As part of their ambitions as a Center of Excellence, Gretchen knew R2R had to be an early adopter of technology that would drive process and services excellence and continuous improvement. “You can easily do it within a 6 to 8 week period. I had two resources on my side: a team member and myself. In fact, we were able to roll out to our Asia entities by ourselves without reliance on the Blackline Team.” Gretchen advises to do the whole automation project “in a big-bang.”
2. Don’t overcomplicate the setup. D&B logically developed the organizational structure to align with how its ERP system was setup. “It was a simple list of entities in a single parent, and then from there we created new parents based on regions, for example North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia. We kept it simple.”
3. Breakdown the silos within the function. In D&B’s Center of Excellence, R2R is broken down into 4 key functions: recording, reconciling, reviewing, and reporting. But in the journey’s early stages, these functions operated in silos. “There were 4 different ways of creating, documenting, and retrieving data. It required a lot of manual intervention to create dashboards and complete each task. Looking back, we achieved our goal as we now have everyone at least executing key functions in the same manner using a standard platform.”
4. Engage team members early. D&B had 3 key tactics:
a. Bring the team in right from the beginning when you’re selecting the vendor. “By the time we were live they had a feel for the system.”
b. Let the most engaged members influence others to encourage on-boarding. “You will have those earlier adopters – shine a light on those and the others will follow.”
c. Don’t just communicate that change is happening; emphasize why it’s happening. “The team all knew that if they put the time and effort up front then they would see the benefit at the end.”
5. Focus on training. This was crucial. D&B held live sessions and had hands-on help from BlackLine to ensure team members adopted and understood the new tool and processes. “When we had hands-on sessions we actually had our preparers come in with reconciliations that they wanted to transfer from excel to Blackline and the team was there to assist, and provide guidance on how to use the system.” This gave staff the opportunity to ask face-to-face questions with the provider.
6. Increase transparency and visibility. Lack of visibility made it difficult to catch and correct discrepancies earlier in the close process. “We now have a tool that provides transparencies and insight 24/7 globally, from the preparer standpoint up to the controller.”
Putting these measures in place has helped D&B refocus R2R resource on value-adding analysis and discrepancies, rather than data entry and gathering information for auditors.
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In the webinar, Gretchen also highlights how D&B:
• Reduced the resource and costs relating to audit and SOX compliance
• Engaged employees by removing manual tasks
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