Build A Business Case For Financial Automation In The Retail Office of Finance

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The retail industry has been subject to many changes, some sudden and others more gradual, that organizations have needed to accommodate. For example, the emergence and demand of the e-commerce industry and the invention of 3rd-Party payment and delivery providers such as Door Dash and Uber Eats.

Because retail organizations are rapidly adjusting to these significant changes, it is crucial that your finance and accounting teams are prepared for those changes. This means transitioning from using spreadsheets and binders to financial automation in the close. However, a new technology initiative requires the Office of Finance to demonstrate the ROI impact that the financial automation software will have for the company. 

Streamlined Data Acquisition

To make the most of your accountants’ time, it is crucial that the time they spend on the data acquisition process is reallocated from manually gathering and inputting data. There are many different approaches that you can take to streamline the data acquisition process, including:

financial automation working from home

It’s important to integrate ERP(s) and source systems directly to collect financial close data. Requiring accounting teams to manually input data is both frustrating and time-consuming when your accountants could be spending their time in other parts of the close cycle or on other, higher-level tasks to advance the organization.

Enhanced Transaction Matching

Though a manual transaction matching process is complex for many companies, this is especially true for retail organizations, who have thousands of different transaction types flowing in. With spreadsheets—historically the accountant’s tool of choice—transaction matching consumes unnecessary amounts of time, especially when many, if not most, transactions can automatically reconcile without extra effort.

An important part of the transaction process that requires more attention is exceptions. Without finding and fixing the root cause of an exception, the same type of exception will undoubtedly occur again in the next close cycle. Additionally, for the retail Office of Finance, matching credit card information, point-of-sale transactions, and bank statements are not manageable in spreadsheets, especially in high volumes.

Build A Business Case For Financial Automation In The Retail Office of Finance | Enhanced Transaction Matching

Using Adra Matcher for your transaction matching process optimizes the financial close for your accountants. The software works by developing custom matching rules to automatically match transactions and highlight the exceptions. Accountants can then spend time digging into the exceptions and refining the process and rules instead of focusing on transactions that are already a perfect match. Matcher not only handles one-to-one exceptions but also one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. Spreadsheets cannot accomplish this complex process as well as Adra can.

Organizations that implement Matcher reduce the time spent matching transactions by 70%.

Simplified Account Reconciliation

After the transaction matching process is complete, it is time to verify the accounts. Adra Balancer provides automated integration both with multiple ERPs directly and through ERP agnostic options in order to integrate General Ledger data into the software. Based on customer-specific rules, much like Matcher, low-risk accounts are automatically reconciled so accountants can focus on high-risk accounts.

Build A Business Case For Financial Automation In The Retail Office of Finance | Simplified Account Reconciliation

Proper procedures and policies are enforced throughout reconciliations, including the approval process. Supporting documentation such as invoices, purchase orders, and bank statements are attached to the tasks and uploaded to the Cloud. Financial automation like Balancer not only simplifies the reconciliation process but produces audit-ready balance sheet reconciliations.

Balancer decreases the time spent on balance sheet reconciliation by 75%.

 

Implementing financial automation like Adra by Trintech in your Office of Finance will produce noticeable, positive ROI for the entire organization. When financial processes are functioning as efficiently as possible, this new support opens up many avenues of direction for your organization.

“Adra allowed us to abandon 700+ Excel spreadsheets in which we were reconciling all of our retail locations’ cash. It is able to automatically match items that already match, and leaves only the exceptions for our cash accountants to work, instead of forcing them to physically match items that are a perfect match.” –G2 Review from Adra Retail Customer

Discover more benefits that Adra by Trintech can provide your retail Office of Finance.

Explore the Benefits of Financial Automation

Written by: Ashton Mathai