Well-functioning month-end close and reconciliation play a central role in defining Record to Report (R2R) process maturity. If not streamlined, the reconciliation process can result in a lack of financial integrity and prove to be an expensive affair. Finance professionals face numerous challenges while closing the books, such as increasingly complex accounting standards, limited access to real-time data, limited automation, many activities to close in parallel within a limited time, manual recons, and the creation of financial statements.
The case was not much different for this global custodian institution, which was overwhelmed with maintaining its journals manually. As a result, due to their legacy reconciliation process, reconciliations were getting delayed, and activity-wise tracking was losing visibility. HCLTech introduced Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud Service (ARCS), through which the company gained real-time visibility into performance and ensured all reconciliations prepared were qualified and fully integrated into the financial close.
However, apart from Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud Service (ARCS), the custodian institution still needed ‘extra agility’ in fast-tracking their digital journey. This ambitious act presented a case for implementing a productivity tool that tracks the real-time efficiency of the users during the month-end period. The true game-changer was HCLTech’s in-house Productivity Tracker (PT) tool, which provided activity-wise details and daily status updates for balance sheet reconciliations, revenue accounting, accruals, journal entries, etc., to complement the ARCS.
The PT tool is highly customizable, where each processor can be assigned daily tasks along with timestamps. There is complete transparency and real-time visibility into the health of operations, as the PT tool highlights dependencies on the customer and positions the sequencing of activities based on criticality and due date.
The PT tool can reduce the month-end close cycle from 7 days to 4 days, create escalation reports, and generate error logs to educate the business user for correcting previous anomalies. What’s more, individual performance is highlighted, best performers are recognized, and low performers are identified for course correction and hand-holding.
The PT tool can improve process performance through data visualization and reporting; a cohesive mix of visual metrics designed to enable informed financial decision-making and acts as a CFO Dashboard and Digital Month End Cockpit. Through its deep-dive insights into essential financial aspects, the tool can support the creation of business-boosting financial strategies, keeping unnecessary operational costs to a minimum, and streamlining processes for optimal fiscal success. In conjunction with the ARCS recon tool, the Productivity Tracker is a bold step towards automation, efficiency improvement, real-time process reporting, and most importantly, reimagined operations.
