How to implement strong internal controls for the financial close
Are financial close deadlines looming?
Are manual journal entries causing stress and delays?
Journal entries are crucial for financial accounting but can often cause delays and inefficiencies in the financial close process due to complex, time-consuming approval workflows, manual data entry and error-prone spreadsheets. Aico Journal Entries offers a comprehensive solution to support your journal entry process.
By standardising your internal control framework, you can improve the reliability of your financial reporting, mitigate risks and build trust with stakeholders. What makes the Aico Journal Entries solution unique is its ability to support a highly complex journal posting workflow that can dynamically change in many different scenarios. Understanding your organisation's specific risks is the first step to controlling them. By building a culture of control, continuous monitoring and improvement you can strengthen the reliability of financial close reporting.
How to strengthen your internal controls
Aico’s Journal Entries solution focuses on increasing process visibility and streamlining the journal entry process for both the internal controls team and well as external auditors. It's designed to automate, simplify and control your entire journal entry process, from creation to posting.
Save time: As well as automating repetitive tasks, live validation before posting means your team isn’t uncovering mistakes long after the journal has been approved.
One of the features that one of our customers really likes, for example, is the multi-company journal feature. They can make a posting from their headquarters into all company codes. For example, a bonus accrual. Before they had Aico, they had to make 400 individual postings for each company. Now, with Aico, there's one master document which creates, controls and posts the 400 individual postings. The benefit is enormous in terms of time-saving.
Create quality postings: Eliminate human error with live validations before posting and enforce specific information in each posting. It's very tempting for time-strapped accountants to just enter the minimum amount of data that the ERP will accept. However, the minimum versus what you want to enforce can be very different. We can configure your journal entries so there are additional rules on top of what the ERP expects so that you can improve the quality of each posting.
Interconnectivity: Although many standalone journal tools will be able to get your journals into your ERP system at some point, the ability to link them to closing or reconciliation tasks is not something they can do, unlike the Aico platform.
Overhauling and standardising your internal financial controls may seem a formidable task, but it's easier to get started than you might think. And our Delivery Team supports you at every stage of the implementation.
“The Aico team made sure the project went smoothly. They immediately addressed any problems identified and provided the necessary support.”
~Satu Horko, Finance Manager at Sandvik Construction and Mining Oy
A familiar story
A lot of the big SAP customers are still using Excel and bulk uploading them.
How are you doing this today?
It's most likely your team works on large Excel spreadsheets and then either uploads or manually retypes them into an ERP, like SAP or Microsoft D365. We also have seen situations where the accountant will be told to put their request in the Excel and store it on a drive for a bot to come along, pick up the Excel from the drive and upload them into the ERP.
Although this may feel like a time-saving piece of automation, they still face the same issue. When the bot tries to upload it, is the information correct? If the data doesn't validate at that point, you've got an error.
And that’s an incredibly messy situation. Can the bot do something with the file? Can it return the file to you or alert you in some way to the error? For example, how do you make sure you've removed the old file and submitted a new one? How do you know the new one's going to validate any better than the old one? These are the sorts of process failures that large enterprises need to solve.
How Aico journal entries works: a closer look
Aico offers you a comprehensive solution to build quality into your journal entry process:
- Create and validate: Quickly create journal entries using pre-built templates or custom formats. Leverage live validation to ensure data accuracy and compliance with accounting rules at the point of creation.
- Approve and post: Implement multi-level approval workflows to maintain control whilst enforcing strict segregation of duties. Automate posting to your ERP system with a single click.
- Monitor and analyse: Track journal entry progress, identify bottlenecks and generate insightful reports to optimise your process.
Would you like to delve deeper into specific control activities or discuss how Aico can support your internal control objectives? Sign up for our live webinar and make good use of the Q&A with our Aico experts.
The best way to optimise your internal control processes
Aico’s Journal Entries solution helps financial teams take control of their hectic closing processes, ensuring compliance, saving time and improving the quality of postings. By automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time validation, Aico empowers financial professionals to focus on more strategic activities:
- Streamlined workflow: Create, validate, approve and post journal entries seamlessly within a single platform.
- Enhanced quality of postings: Reduce errors and improve data quality through automated checks and validations.
- Improved efficiency: Automate repetitive tasks, such as accruals and reversals, to free up time for strategic analysis.
- Strengthened compliance: Enforce internal controls, maintain a detailed audit trail and simplify compliance audits.
- Enhanced collaboration: Improve communication and collaboration between finance teams and other departments.
Take the Next Step with Aico
Join industry leaders like Sandvik in transforming your financial processes with Aico’s Journal Entries solution. Take charge of your internal controls and your financial workflows now.
Sign up for our live webinar:
Discover the full potential of Aico’s journal entry solution features.
