Year-end is usually a stressful time for those in the finance or accounting departments. It feels a lot like a special project that gets laid on top of everything else we have to do. Bills still need to be paid, current financials still need to go out and life continues to go on. But the year will still end. The most complicating factor is that we often do not have direct control over the information that we need to close our year. We need to wait for the insurance company to send a summary of cash value of life insurance. We need our bank to confirm loan balances. We need, we need, we need . . . So is there anything we can do with technology to make our lives a little easier at year-end? I think there is. In fact, I think the ways you can make it easier are also helpful to make month end easier as well.
Let’s start with one of the more obvious quick hits. One of the new features of Dynamics GP 10.0 was the Reconcile to GL feature. It takes out a lot of the work in tying your Historical Aged Trial Balance for either payables or receivables to your general ledger. Even if you post through your general ledger, there are ways that your subledger can get out of sync with your general ledger – a GL entry, a banking entry, an errant distribution on a sales entry, etc. Sometimes it’s hard to find these entries or hard to know exactly where to look. The Reconcile to GL feature helps you match transactions in GL with the originating transactions in the subledgers and shows transactions that are matched, potentially matched, and unmatched. The unmatched transactions would theoretically be the transactions that make you out of balance. Since the report deploys in Excel, it’s easy to use and you don’t need any special reporting tools or skills to use it.
Another quick and relatively easy way to use technology at year-end is to use SharePoint for your year-end checklist. More often than not, I see a controller or CFO with a paper copy of a year-end to do list. That list has people’s names on it for certain items and specific dependencies with some steps depending on others. A great way to encourage collaboration and accountability is to publish the list on SharePoint. That way, finance team members have visibility into exactly what progress has been made, what remains to be done and how they can help each other.
With the end of January nearly upon us, I bid you best of luck with W-2’s, 1099’s and the rest of year-end.
Jessie