With a recent study finding that the national median of membership growth to credit unions over a 12-month period has decreased, it’s imperative that you act quickly to encourage growth. But how can your credit union quickly and effectively grow memberships?

The short answer: Find ways to optimize the work you’re already doing. By minimizing mistakes, reducing repetitive and menial tasks, simplifying compliance, and reducing write-offs, credit union accounting and finance teams can refocus their efforts on value-added activities – like offering the best rates and boosting memberships!

Here are some quick and easy ways that automated financial close management with Trintech can help solve some of your most time-consuming struggles:

Compliance with Regulations and Audits

Credit unions face numerous regulatory requirements under the National Credit Union Administration, none of which can fall to the wayside without major risk of fines and potential legal liabilities. With each new regulation to consider comes a slew of auditors, red pens at the ready to ensure strict compliance.

While optimal month-end close best practices and automation with Trintech won’t change the nature of the requirements of an audit, it will make audits easier, giving finance and accounting teams easy access to accurate reporting so they can get back to business as usual.

“With an automated risk management strategy, accountants can be alerted to issues before auditors come to call.
And, if something does come up during an audit, the team can retrieve the appropriate historical data more quickly and provide it to the auditors.”

4 Steps to Simplifying Financial Risk with Automation ebook

Tight Budgets and the Need for Cost Savings

Every organization is concerned about their bottom line, and credit unions are not immune to economic pressures. This leaves little to no room in the budget for write-offs or other accounting missteps. Similarly, there’s often no wiggle room for associated necessary expenses, such as overtime. These constrictions negatively affect finance and accounting teams’ morale, putting undue pressure that leads to burnout.

Automated financial close management can help your finance and accounting teams do more in less time, while simultaneously reducing errors and bolstering confidence in the data provided.

“We now know if our teams are meeting policies and can identify risk and improve quality of data.
It takes us 300 hours less for monitoring, but the data is 100 times better.”

Regional Financial Services Company

High Volume of Transactions and Manual Data Sourcing

With 136.6 million members nationally, totaling $2.21 trillion in total assets, it’s no surprise that the sheer number of transactions coming from so many disparate sources can easily overwhelm finance and accounting teams. Credit unions need to contend with member deposits, loan disbursements, repayments, interest calculations, and more. Managing and reconciling these transactions, especially when they involve complex calculations or unique member accounts, can be time-consuming and prone to errors.

Trintech’s comprehensive solutions simplify financial close management, working together seamlessly to capture data sets from multiple sources and automatically match transactions. This allows your finance and accounting teams the freedom and flexibility to focus their time on researching exceptions.

“70% of high-volume transactions are matched automatically, freeing up time for the research and resolution of exceptions.”

Western and Southern

Legacy Systems and Antiquated Processes

We’ve all felt the frustration of sending multiple spreadsheets back and forth, accompanied by emails and Teams messages meant to clarify that only add confusion. When vital information is scattered to the wind, finding what you need to complete even menial daily tasks becomes yet another item on your to-do list. Without an efficient financial close management system to organize and manage the massive amounts of data that your finance and accounting teams deal with on a daily basis, they’re wasting valuable time.

Leveraging Trintech’s leading technology can bring your team together and get everyone on the same page, providing visibility into outstanding tasks (and their owners).

“[We] used to take two to three weeks to actually do everything and try to get everything matched up to work.
[We’re] now taking a couple of days with [Trintech].”

Lookout Credit Union

Are you ready to start optimizing your credit union’s month-end close best practices with Trintech? Visit our webpage to learn more about how we can help!

Written by: Nicole Tallman