A Guide to Automation: Month-End Close

 

2005:

Mike is working at ABC Realty, a real estate investment trust. He is responsible for closing the accounting period for his 100+ companies in different regions with various closing schedules every month. As part of the business process, the accounting teams from different areas send multiple emails, after they have verified that all batches posted with a list of companies that can close. Once Mike gets the email, he logs into his enterprise applications and closes the accounting period for each company. During month-end, Mike works late hours to achieve this task.

 

2018:

After reviewing the data, accounting users send an email to a supervised inbox with a list of companies that can close. The automation tool monitors content within the inbox and checks if all the batches have posted for the company before automatically closing the accounting period. A notification is sent to Mike that this action has occurred, and once the automation tool runs integrity reports, it notifies Mike as well as his accounting teams.

 

A lot has changed since 2005 making the above possible with technological advancements and successful cloud computing. Machine-learning techniques are having unprecedented consequences for financial processing and oversight. It has accelerated the evolution of business process automation, and because of this, working late hours during month-end is a thing of the past.

Companies are leveraging tools to maximize automation rather than re-engineer it. Automating simple monotonous business processes such as month-end close can lead to better operational efficiency, governance, and most importantly, save time.

 

Automation tools such as AtomIQ, with its ability to orchestrate business processes, can work out of the box across different Enterprise Resource Planning, thereby giving the ability to automate tedious business processes.

To learn more about how AtomIQ can help enable business process automation, contact us for a one-on-one demo for you and your team.

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