Client
A global leader in digital advertising technology
Challenge
Manual Financial Reconciliation Processes in a complex sales and billing environment
Our client has a complex and multi-hierarchical sales process with thousands of customers worldwide, resulting in vast quantities of sales and financial data across disparate systems, including Salesforce for customer relationships and NetSuite for financial records. As the company had recently gone public, streamlining and improving the quality of the reconciliation process between sales orders and invoices presented a significant operational hurdle. The manual reconciliation process was time-consuming and prone to human error, and it also introduced a critical vulnerability: a lack of robust auditability. With auditors demanding rigorous verification, our client needed a solution to automate these critical financial reconciliations, ensuring accuracy, accelerating reporting, and bolstering trust in financial data.
Solution
Intelligent Automation for Audit Confidence
Dispatch was tasked with architecting and implementing an audit automation solution. Leveraging the power of Workato as a data orchestration platform and Snowflake for data warehousing and reporting, our team developed a solution to eliminate manual reconciliation processes and automatically deliver auditable reports.
The core of the solution involved:
- Centralized Data Views in Snowflake: We established report views within Snowflake, which pulled and aggregated critical data from Salesforce and NetSuite, providing a central source of truth for both sales and invoice data.
- Automated Report Generation: Our solution automatically generates three financial reports:
- Unbilled Invoices Report: Identifying Salesforce invoice records not yet posted to NetSuite GL is crucial for accurate accruals. The reconciliation team can manually trigger this report after “actualization” is complete, ensuring data validity.
- Amount Discrepancies Report: Highlighting discrepancies in invoice amounts between Salesforce and NetSuite is vital for identifying and rectifying billing inconsistencies. This report is automatically generated monthly after the AR period closure.
- Duplicate Invoices Report: Pinpointing instances of repeated invoice data in Salesforce, safeguarding against erroneous double-billing. This report is also automatically generated monthly after the AR period closure.
- Secure Report Delivery: Reports are automatically delivered to Dropbox, ensuring easy access for the finance and reconciliation teams and external auditors.
- Streamlined Workflows: The solution orchestrates a sales and finance reconciliation workflow:
- Unbilled Invoices: The Finance reconciliation team confirms “actualization,” then triggers report generation via Slack. The solution then delivers the report to the repository for review and subsequent journal entries.
- Amount Discrepancies & Duplicate Invoices: The integration automatically triggers these reports on the 7th of each month, delivering them to the repository for the reconciliation team to review and book appropriate journal entries.
The initial phase of the project focused on building the foundational reports, which we then enhanced with more detailed issue descriptions and intelligent routing to resolve any reconciliation discrepancies proactively.
Impact
Precision, Efficiency and Trust
The implementation of this audit automation solution has delivered tangible and transformative results:
- Eliminated Manual Errors: By automating data comparison and report generation, the solution has drastically reduced the risk of human error inherent in manual reconciliation, leading to higher data integrity and more accurate financial statements.
- Accelerated Reporting Cycles: What once took hours of manual effort in Excel is now completed in minutes, significantly reducing the time required to generate critical reconciliation reports. This newfound efficiency frees the finance team to focus on strategic analysis rather than laborious data compilation.
- Enhanced Auditability: With immutable, point-in-time reports generated from a centralized, auditable data source (Snowflake), the client can now provide external auditors with immutable evidence of financial accuracy and robust internal controls. This built-in transparency fosters greater trust and reduces audit complexities.
- Cost Savings and Revenue Protection: By promptly identifying unbilled invoices, amount discrepancies, and duplicates, the solution directly contributes to revenue protection and prevents financial leakage, translating into significant cost savings.
- Empowered Decision-Making: With accurate financial data, the client’s finance team is empowered to make more informed decisions and has greater confidence in the integrity of their financial reporting.
The Advantage of Audit Automation
This system keeps sales and financial data quality high throughout the year, and significantly streamlines and de-risks the annual audit process. This solution can be used in different industries and tailored to integrate with different sales and financial systems. Audit automation has great potential to improve financial controls while reducing cost and risk. To learn how Dispatch can help you streamline your financial processes, contact us today.
Gavin Hay is the co-founder, President, and CTO of Dispatch Integration with experience leading high performing cross-functional teams. He has over 20 years of experience as a systems architect in the HR and Payroll industry and has a deep understanding of the full stack technology infrastructure required to deliver exceptional software integrations.
