Comprehensive weather insights help safeguard your operations and drive confident decisions to make everyday mining operations as safe and efficient as possible.Top 3 Problems at End-of-Month Reconciliation and How to Solve Them
When the end of the month rolls around, many accounting team members face it with a, shall we say, “less than enthusiastic” attitude. And who can blame them? Tracking down all those documents is a time-suck, and many times, it requires logging into a supplier portal to try to recreate them. Let’s take a look at common challenges accounting departments in downstream energy face.
Lost bills of lading: they come in at the beginning of the month and get mis-flagged, so they end up in the wrong place. Or they’re lost altogether, requiring immense time to research and reproduce the BOL.
Consider having one person be the dedicated “document dispatcher.” This expert will concentrate specifically on taking in BOLs, assigning them a “lane,” and ensuring they arrive at the correct destination. When the end of the month comes around, the accounting team can all go to the dispatcher with their requests, and she’ll know exactly where the data is. This kind of controlled access prevents the confusion of different filing and organizational systems for the same purpose.
Supplier documents that span two different billing cycles: The supplier portal yields documents for the entire shipment of product, but the product in question was delivered over a span of days that cross months.
This one’s a little tougher but could be worth the effort: consider creating a template that combines the supplier data into one document that fits your billing cycle. It will still require manual data entry, but if there’s at least a form for the data to follow, it will make the data clearer for reconciliation.
Suppliers use different systems than accounting, requiring the data to be manually typed into spreadsheets and converted into a format compatible with the office accounting software.
This is another problem that requires manual data entry. The best approach to this problem is to allow for more time. Manually converting and re-entering data from one format to another is where errors are most likely to crop up. Building additional time into the process allows for a review period. Once errors are eliminated, it’s safe to consider the data as “final,” to be included in reconciliation.
If these problems are making too much of a negative impact on your accounting productivity, TIMS® Journal ID from DTN may be the solution you’re after. It automatically groups data by inventory activity period, eliminating the need to manually track and link data from different suppliers. Data is normalized into a single XML feed that flows seamlessly into your current accounting system. With easier, more efficient reconciliation, you’ll realize revenue faster, and save employees’ time.