System speeds-up bank reconciliation and improves compliance through automation
Vale Europe Ltd, a leading refiner of precious metals, has reduced the time and cost involved in the completion of its bank reconciliation by implementing an integrated financial management solution from m-hance. This system, m-hance Bank Management, has enabled Vale Europe Ltd to achieve greater compliance and has halved the time it takes to complete its bank reconciliation process through automating a range of manual-based procedures.
Vale previously relied on spreadsheets and for the past three years a standalone system to process its monthly bank reconciliation from its Acton-based office. This process was time-consuming when it came to reconciling bank account transactions from Vale’s General Ledger, Sales Ledger and Purchase Ledger files within its finance system with the corresponding data displayed in the company’s bank statements.
Elaine Ambrose, Accountant at Vale Europe Ltd, explains: “Although we only process one bank reconciliation, our transaction amounts in sterling run into millions of pounds so financial compliance and data accuracy is absolutely vital to our business. We therefore sought an automated system which could seamlessly interface with our m-hance finance solution to improve transparency and control to minimise the risk of errors and increase productivity.”
After reviewing the market, Vale selected m-hance’s integrated Bank Management solution to gain a faster, more accurate and efficient means of reconciling transactions by automating manual administrative processes. The solution’s rule-based matching functionality automatically reconciles transactions within Vale’s m-hance finance system to an imported bank statement to eliminate duplication of effort and reduce errors. The flexible web-based system also allows Vale to insert multiple search criteria per rule combined with pre-defined tolerances within date and amount fields and enter orders remotely, further improving productivity.
By utilising Bank Management’s advanced reporting capabilities, Vale can easily extract key management information such as reconciled and unmatched items to achieve greater financial visibility and control. In addition, reports can be customised in order to quickly provide up-to-date and accurate transactional information in a concise format to aid compliance.
Ambrose comments: “Since implementing m-hance Bank Management our reconciliation process has been extremely quick and straightforward as the system does exactly what we need it to do. By automating the reconciling of transactions within our General Ledger, Sales Ledger and Purchase Ledger modules, we have reduced the time it takes us to complete our month-end bank reconciliation process by half, from two hours to one hour. This has enabled the finance department to concentrate on more valuable tasks.”
Ambrose adds: “By improving the accuracy of our bank reconciliation processes we have been able to benefit from greater financial control as the system easily highlights potential errors, unexpected charges, input errors or missing transactions.”