Promoted By Geir Tonnessen | July 24, 2018
Bank reconciliation has long been synonymous with the tick-and-tie method. Accountants lay both records side-by-side and move through them, checking one against the other—line after line.
But tick-and-tie is also, well, infamous.
To start with, the tick-and-tie method demands a huge amount of time. Exactly how much depends on the business, but reports range from hours to days to weeks. Many businesses don’t even reconcile their accounts until the next accounting period ends.
These time requirements handicap decision-makers. Instead of real-time BI, they often have to wait weeks for old data. Even then, the data they get may not be entirely reliable; like other manual tasks, tick-and-tie has a high rate of error. And any mistakes are often critical.
The average accountant can reconcile fewer than 10 transactions in a minute. So if a business wants to reconcile faster, they’ll either have to hire more accountants or overburden the ones they have. Yet more hiring is costly, while overburdening results in more frequent errors.
It comes down to this: tick-and-tie is outdated. It’s costly and inefficient.
As such, it is ripe for automation.
Click the image above to see the full infographic of this process
During the early days of software automation, businesses had reason to prefer the risk of manual error (known) to the unknown risks of automating software.
That was then.
Automation has long since matured. Unified ERP systems like Xledger offer a way to remove human limitations while keeping human oversight.
Xledger performs bank rec on a daily basis. Accountants still oversee the process and can intervene whenever they need to. But mental exhaustion and preventable errors are things of the past.
The average Xledger customer saves over 24 hours on bank reconciliation. Even the most complex organization can reconcile in under thirty minutes.
This automated method bolsters decision-making. Leaders now have a timely and reliable picture of their company’s health. Needless to say, this results in wiser decisions and better outcomes.
Accounting principles are 500 years old.
Accounting methods shouldn’t be.
If you’d like more information about Xledger bank rec, please reach out. We’d be happy to hear from you.