Oracle Corp. today said it has added account reconciliation and transaction matching capabilities to its NetSuite enterprise resource planning suite, addressing what it says is a major pain point for organizations closing their books.

NetSuite Account Reconciliation can be used to standardize and automate the reconciliation process, produce more accurate financial statements and enable faster closing times, the company said. The capabilities are based on technology in the Enterprise Performance Management function of Oracle’s Fusion suite of cloud-based ERP applications.

The new feature automates reconciliation for accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank and credit card transactions, prepaid accounts, accruals, fixed assets accounts, intercompany transactions and other balance sheet accounts, Oracle said. It enables companies to reduce their reliance on spreadsheet-intensive manual closing processes that are prone to duplication, versioning problems and limited collaboration.

The capability ensures that reconciliations aren’t missed or lost and improves auditability across a geographically distributed organization. Controls can be set to deliver notifications to individuals to help keep their teams on track. They can also use dashboards to see the real-time status of reconciliations and variance details.

NetSuite Account Reconciliation is linked to NetSuite ERP to allow accounting professionals to quickly and securely access general ledger data. Twenty prebuilt templates and formats are included to speed reconciliation and improve consistency. Oracle said its transaction matching engine can automatically match millions of transactions in minutes. A secure document repository safeguards reconciliations against alterations or loss.

Accounting struggles

“It’s a big module for us,” said Paul Farrell, vice president of product management at NetSuite. “This is something we’ve been working on for quite some time. In the past, customers have struggled with spreadsheets or they’ve gone to third parties to carry out this functionality.” Farrell said NetSuite’s reconciliation capabilities are on par with those of dedicated software applications.

“This streamlines the process for any company that has millions of rows of detail that they need to reconcile against, has to bring in external data or use other products outside of NetSuite for a very complex reconciliation,” Farrell said. “It’s a big addition to our financial stream.”

One of the challenges of reconciliation is that it typically requires sign-offs from people across an organization. Using individual spreadsheets frustrates information sharing and the adoption of formal processes to ensure information integrity.

“It can add a whole chunk of time to closing,” Farrell said. “They need to have all the documentation in one place to validate the accounts. A big part of this is to consolidate voting documents and other things that all map across the reconciliation process.” Rules can be defined to match transactions automatically and check for variations.

Industry-focused

Because reconciliation differs across industries, NetSuite is concentrating the new features on its core industries, which include software, services, not-for-profits, manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

“That’s something that NetSuite has always been very focused on,” Farrell said. “The more generic the solution, the more of an implementation challenge it is.”

At the same time, reconciliation is such a universal practice that customers will have little difficulty understanding how to use the new features, he said. “Most companies will know how to pick it up and use it and it will delight them to automate a lot of the things they have had to do manually,” Farrell said.

NetSuite Account Reconciliation will be available in North America this month with availability in international regions planned for the third quarter. It will carry a separate licensing fee but Oracle didn’t provide details.

Image: Oracle