Welcome to the third webinar in the “Journal Entry Process Excellence” series. In this session, we are exploring how connecting journal entry and financial close process leads to more efficiency and faster financial reporting. The chances are that you probably still use separate applications for journal entry management and other parts of the financial close process such as account reconciliation and closing task management. The lack of robust integration between these can cause delays and inefficiencies during the closing period – a couple of days when time is of the essence.
Timing is critical in the financial close process and having to switch between different applications, interfaces and windows make the whole process take more time. Some of the factors that really add to the complexity problem are:
The lack of automatic linking of closing tasks and related journal entries
The inability to create a journal directly from closing tasks
The inability to journal away an incorrect reconciliation on the spot
The inability to reconcile accounts by linking them back to the journals, which have related supporting evidence and approvals
You are in double complexity trouble if your integration between closing task systems and the journal management system is not live. Batch upload integrations may require your team to switch between programs, even more, to force a manual update when time is of the essence or to check when the data has flowed through to the other systems. When it comes to the size of your company’s system architecture, in other words, how many different systems your company uses for journal entry and financial close management, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.