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A "Month-End" In the Life of a Frustrated Accountant Before Insight Reconciler

We start month-end with a stack of reports from the General Ledger and all the supporting ledgers (like Accounts Receivable) trying to make sure everything balances. It took an hour just to get the trial balance and another 30 minutes to even get the open AR report. Naturally, they didn't balance.

The next step was to run the standard AR integrity reports in JDE. The good news was that it also showed that we were out of balance. The bad news was that it didn't show us anything useful like where we were out of balance. In fact, it should have just had the words "good luck" at the bottom since that is likely what we needed at that point. We were six hours into month-end and no closer to closing the books than we were that morning.

With no other options, we decided the best way to reconcile the accounts and find our variance items was to use our favorite spreadsheet tool. Off we go to dump the data out of our ERP (which now means the data is instantly out-of-date, insecure and unwieldy). To do this, we have to become database experts knowing all the fields and files we need to export. Since the data set is so large we can't just copy and paste it all; instead, we had to break out our college SQL textbook. Having done that for our AR data, we then wrestled with the General Ledger monster and hoped the export didn't cause the lights to dim.

As always, one of our colleagues made some adjustments in JDE – making our export slightly out-of-whack. But never mind, we'll plough on because now we can show-off our spreadsheet pivot table skills.

We loaded the data, created our merge rules and married the results into a pivot table – truly a thing of beauty. We were later dumbfounded when we realized that our export only included summary information and not all the essential details about the invoices, receipts, voids, chargebacks, and everything else. We are now two days into the month-end close with nothing to show for it. However, we did have an amazing pivot table that was useless beyond being a nice desktop background.

Instead, we’re faced with trawling around for the transactions in JD Edwards based on the few clues we picked up from the pivot table. If we were lucky enough to find all the issues and then get them fixed, we had to do it all again for other areas like Accounts Payable, Inventory, Received Not Vouchered, and so on. Let's face it... if we could, it would’ve been a major achievement and something for our resumes. As time ticks away, we get ourselves to an “acceptable” window of error and close the books. We are done for another month and get to start the whole process again in about two weeks.

A “Month-End” in the Life of a Happy Accountant After Insight Reconciler

We start by monitoring our reconciliations on a daily, weekly or monthly basis – no need to wait until we are already busy at month-end. Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, we setup our Insight Reconciler SmartViews to show us just the items (in detail or summary) that are causing our out-of-balance condition.

In short, the process now looks like this:

• Open Insight Reconciler and look at the reconciling issues

• Fix them in JDE and go home.