The Problem
Month after month, the accounting and finance team had to create journal entries to make closing adjustments to accounting accounts. They carried out this process across every country in Latin America, so it took considerable time to download all the information, validate it, and then create the different formats to upload into SAP and other information systems. As an accounting close task, the team might have to repeat this process more than once per country if there were any changes to the accounts.
The problem was that staff had to spend a great deal of time on this fully repetitive task, exposing themselves to potential human errors.
The challenge was to give that time back to employees so they could invest it in higher value-added tasks during the close, reducing operating costs and potential errors.
The Process
We worked hand in hand with the team responsible for creating these journal entries, understanding every detail of the process and the main problems they faced day to day. After this, we were able to identify the step-by-step of the activity and the key points to account for when automating the process:
- 1The automation had to pull all the balances of the different accounting accounts from SAP.
- 2A series of steps had to be performed to clean the information, keeping only what was needed.
- 3Each of the necessary Journal Entries/formats had to be created to later upload them into the systems.
Results Achieved
98% time saved
Time during the close is critical to achieving satisfactory results. We were able to give valuable time back to the company.