If you’re already using Adra Balancer and Adra Matcher, your close is probably in a much better place than it used to be. Reconciliations are faster, exceptions are clearer, and your team spends less time on the close, and more time actually resolving issues. But there’s usually one piece that still feels manual: journal entries.

Reconciliations and matches may happen in Adra. But adjustments tend to live in spreadsheets with supporting details in emails. The journal entry itself is keyed into the ERP, and then manually tied back to the original issue. You can show an auditor and it’s all there, but it’s slow, risky, and disconnected from the rest of your close.

Adra Journal Entry exists to close that gap.

Why Journal Entries Need Their Own Home

Journal entries aren’t just an administrative step at the end of the close. They’re where corrections, estimates, allocations, and complex activity are actually recorded in the ledger.

When those entries are scattered across spreadsheets, shared drives, and emails, you create more work in the long run. It’s harder to prove exactly how a JE ties back to a reconciliation or matching exception. You run the risk of people re-keying the same information multiple times. And it causes limited visibility for Controllers who don’t have a clear, concise view of what’s been created, approved, or posted.

For organizations that are already automating reconciliations and matching, this process becomes the last manual hiccup in an otherwise connected close. Centralizing journal entries in Adra turns them into a managed, visible part of your close, rather than a separate spreadsheet or manual job.

How to Manage Journal Entries in Adra

Adra Journal Entry gives you a single place to create, track, and route journal entries as part of your existing Adra close, then pushes them to your ERP for approval and posting. Because the mechanics of Adra Journal Entry are intentionally simple, most teams can adopt it without a heavy change management effort. A typical workflow might look like this:

1. A reconciling item in Balancer or an exception in Matcher is identified as needing a journal entry.
2. The preparer creates a JE directly from that context in Adra, with the option of choosing to use a template for consistency. They can also attach any documentation or make notes as needed directly in the JE. This ensures all supporting information remains with the corresponding entry, for a faster, easier audit.
3. Once the journal is ready to post, you can export all or some journals to a single flat file or automatically upload them to your ERP where you can follow your usual approval workflows.

Adra’s enables you to monitor journal entry activity from anywhere they are created in Adra with a single, consolidated dashboard with drilldown capabilities. At every step, the journal is tied back to its source with a full audit trail.

That means:

• The entry, its supporting documentation, and the underlying reconciliation or match can all be viewed in one ecosystem.
• Your ERP remains the system of record for posted JEs, but Adra becomes the control layer for how they’re created and managed.
• Controllers and managers can see, at a glance, where journals stand and where bottlenecks are forming.

Additional capabilities allow users to clone and reverse journal entries for common workflows like recurring accruals – streamlining the process even further while maintaining full control.

Journal Entry Use Cases

Centralizing journal entries in Adra helps with:

• Adjustments and corrections identified during account reconciliations
• Bank fee and charges identified during transaction matching
• Intercompany and cost allocations
• Tax and regulatory postings
• Currency and FX differences
• Depreciation and amortization schedules

Moving these from being tracked with spreadsheets into Adra Journal Entry shortens audits, improves consistency, and lowers the risk of missing or duplicate entries.

Building Toward Automation and AI

Centralizing journal entries in Adra becomes the foundation for more advanced transformation. Soon to come on Adra’s Journal Entry roadmap include features like:

• Dynamic approval workflows that route journals differently depending on risk, threshold, account, or entity.

• Rule-based, automated, recurring JEs, so routine entries like monthly accruals or amortization can be generated automatically.
• AI-assisted JEs, where Adra can help suggest journal entries based on historical patterns—always under the accountant’s control for review.

All of this builds on the simple idea: when your journal entries live in one place, connected to the rest of your close, the more value you can unlock from future enhancement. None of that works well if journal entries are locked in Excel. Once they’re centralized in Adra, automation and AI are much easier to apply in a controlled, auditable way.

See Adra Journal Entry in Action

If you’re an existing Adra Balancer or Adra Matcher customer, adding Adra Journal Entry is one of the fastest ways to reduce manual work, improve accuracy, and prepare your team for more automated and AI-driven processes.

If you’re not using Adra at all yet, adding a full, connected solution can help take weeks off your close – reducing costs, mitigating risk, and supporting growth.

Watch the on-demand demo to see how Adra Journal Entry can complete your close process.

Written By: Elizabeth Connors