Improving the Financial Close Process Through Automation and Visibility

Finance teams are under significant pressure to accomplish larger and larger amounts of work each year – often without increased manpower. This means that organizations must find new solutions and capabilities to streamline these workflows.

Findings from SAPinsider’s Automating the Record to Report and Financial Close Process benchmark research report found that more than 75% of SAP organizations agreed that automated adjustments and balance sheet reconciliation were either important or very important for companies to optimize their financial close strategies. However, just 26% of these organizations actually have a solution like this in place.

Importance of Automation in the Financial Close

Automating daily matching and reconciliations in the financial close is crucial for efficiency, accuracy, and compliance. Manual processes are time-consuming, error-prone, and resource-intensive, increasing the risk of misstatements and delays.

Automation ensures real-time data validation, faster error detection, and seamless integration across financial systems. It enhances visibility, reduces operational costs, and minimizes human intervention, allowing finance teams to focus on strategic tasks.

Automated reconciliations also improve audit readiness, regulatory compliance, and financial transparency. By eliminating bottlenecks and inconsistencies, organizations can close their books faster, improve cash flow management, and make informed business decisions with greater confidence and accuracy.

Finding the Right Solution

With many organizations making the move to SAP S/4HANA, this creates an ideal opportunity to rethink essential financial processes like the financial close. Many organizations are turning to partners like Trintech, as its financial close platforms improve visibility while managing risk by automating balance sheet reconciliations, transaction matching, close management, journal entry, and more.

Trintech has worked with notable partners like Bayer to infuse automation into their critical workflows. For organizations like Bayer, scale is an essential consideration. Trintech is uniquely capable of accommodating large amounts of transactions.

“Our previous solution was self-developed and integrated with SAP through custom ABAP programs, tables, and a WebDynpro UI. Managing manual work on disparate solutions on each system led to increased workload and complexity that wasn’t sustainable for our team long-term. It became clear very early on that our self-developed solution would not scale with the migration to SAP S/4HANA which is where our conversations with Trintech began,” said Marc-Oliver Deinert, GPO General Ledger Team at Bayer.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Automation is no longer optional. While many organizations have been able to manage their financial close processes manually, this era is coming to an end. As requirements grow more complex and data volumes grow, companies cannot execute this process by hand. Automation not only reduces the time the financial close takes, but it reduces opportunities for errors and oversights.

Enhancing visibility should be a priority. Drawn out financial close processes can leave organizations in the dark. Real-time financial information is a vital tool that decision makers need, so ensuring that they have an accurate view of their organization’s financial health should be prioritized. Working with partners like Trintech reduces the time it takes to reconcile accounts and match transactions, reducing the time of the overall close.

Build a business case through immediate ROI. Organizations have numerous priorities and limited budgets. Many SAPinsiders are choosing to partner with Trintech as it has demonstrated the ability to help users derive significant ROI and helped bolster risk management.