A survey of CFOs, CEOs and COOs shows there is potential for companies to improve their reconciliations processes, with many companies still relying on manual work, home grown systems and Excel spreadsheets. The Reconciliations Survey 2017 was carried out by FX-MM magazine in association with SmartStream.

Here is a summary of some of the survey's findings:

• 44 per cent of respondents do not have automated reconciliations processes and rely on manual interventions;
• 70 per cent of the companies in the study reconcile 100,000 transactions each day on average;
• 15 per cent reconcile more than 500,000 transactions a day;
• 70 per cent of companies employ up to 10 full-time reconciliations staff, while the remaining 30 per cent employ more than 10;
• 46 per cent use an in-house system for reconciliations; and
• 52 per cent don't have a view of system performance, meaning they lack basic knowledge to assess their reconciliations.

What do these findings tell us?

What's striking is the reliance on manual processes, spreadsheets and in-house reconciliations systems, which are labour intensive and make the reconciliations process vulnerable to errors. There's evidently a lot of scope for companies to make significant improvements, mainly through automating processes. This will inevitably have an effect on employee headcount but should lead to lower processing costs and overheads.

Yesterday CTMfile covered some of the ways companies can improve their accounts payable (A/P) process, and some of the four suggestions could also be applied to reconciliations: 4 steps to unlocking value in accounts payable

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CTMfile take: How does your company manage the reconciliations process? How did you manage to solve the problems of manual intervention, error rates or reliance on spreadsheets?