Sixty nine per cent of finance professionals said in a recent survey* that manual effort was the number 1 cause for bottlenecks in the financial close process.
The longer companies keep the financial close process manual, the longer they are harbouring risks and undermining any aspirations for tighter controls.
In another report it was discussed that the percentage of Excel documents that presented errors (driven by formulas or otherwise) was a staggering 88%.
For shared services organizations still operating in manual-heavy, Excel-heavy, or lever-arch folder-heavy environments, chances are your month end cycle is protracted, labor intense, and certainly not error free.
One accounting trick that Blackline say R2R professionals in a manual environment try and master is something called WITTB. As Susan Parcells of Blackline says, “this is something you often find in a spreadsheet cell, sitting just above the TOTAL. And what is stands for is ‘What It Takes To Balance’.”
This WIITB suggests a ‘cover up’ ie we need to get to this number to reconcile the books, but we don’t have the time or resource or the capability to actually execute an accurate reconciliation.
For Blackline and Financial Controllers everywhere, this sounds terrifying.
There is a way out. There is a path ahead that spells the end to WITTB. Western Union has been using the Blackline solution for 2 years. On Tuesday 25th October they’ll be sharing their story on a sharedserviceslink webinar.
This honest-talking, practical webinar will help you if you are looking to introduce further efficiencies into your financial close or reconciliation processes.
*Hackett Survey
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