Crown Holdings Increasing their Efficiency and Accuracy across their Balance Sheet Reconciliation Process
Case Study
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Crown UK Shared Service Centre struggled with a very manual and inconsistent approach when it came to their balance sheet reconciliations.
Business Drivers to Automate
“Our balance sheet reconciliation process was time-consuming, repetitive and used reams of A4 paper which needed signing by the preparer and then the approver, which were often times in separate locations,” said Dawn Hill, Accountant at Crown UK Shared Service Centre. “I used to conduct the process in Excel and would have to print them out and drive the documents 120 miles to my boss’s office for approval because we weren’t based out of the same office. He would then have to approve and sign each by hand and then they would be filed manually.” There was a lack of standardization across the process which became an even bigger issue once they were required to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. Not only was the manual approach extremely time consuming, there were also repetitive reconciliations occurring because there was a lack of visibility into what was being completed.
There were several reasons why we decided to implement Adra Balancer, including that the solution was paperless, allowed for a remote review and approval process, provided visibility into the status of the balance sheet reconciliation process and met the needs of our Financial Accounting policy.”
Why Adra® by Trintech?
“We knew we needed to implement a cloud-based solution that would cut out our use of paper and provide a transparent audit trail of all our documentation,” continued Hill. With that need in mind, the Head of the European Shared Service Centers decided to implement Adra Balancer. “There were several reasons why we decided to implement Adra Balancer, including that the solution was paperless, allowed for a remote review and approval process, provided visibility into the status of the balance sheet reconciliation process and met the needs of our Financial Accounting policy,” continued Hill.
Crown UK Shared Service Centre implemented Adra Balancer in January 2015. “The implementation of the Adra solution was quick and seamless, and with no involvement by our IT department,” continued Hill. Because of the ease of roll out, Crown Europe quickly followed with implementing Adra Balancer in their Engineering factory in January 2017, their Middle East beverage division in 2018 and in the Tunisia division in 2019.
“We knew what we wanted to do and where we wanted to be but weren’t sure how to achieve it,” said Hill. “The Adra consultants were there to provide on-site training and steer us in the right direction.”
Now with Adra, the team can complete the reconciliations and the approver can just log into the solution and can review and approve them remotely, reducing travel costs significantly.”
SOLUTION IN ACTION
Adra has been instrumental in helping Crown gain real-time visibility into their balance sheet reconciliations. “With a click of a button, I now have access to a real-time dashboard to gain full visibility into where we are in our balance sheet reconciliation process,” said Hill.
In addition, the solution has allowed Crown to reduce the cost and time across their process. “We used to spend a significant amount of time and effort preparing these reconciliations to be approved,” continued Hill. In addition, currently, due to the global pandemic, the Adra solution has been critical in ensuring their team is completing and approving reconciliations in a timely manner while working remotely.
The Adra solution has also allowed the Crown team to reprioritize their efforts to focus on higher value-add accounts. “There is an automatic reconciliation and approval of zero balance and/or unchanged balances, reducing the number of reconciliations we are having to do each month,” said Hill.
Crown has a focus on continuous improvement and will be continually optimizing the functionality within Adra Balancer with the potential of expanding their usage of additional processes within the Adra Suite in the future.
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