Bank Reconciliation: Challenges & Solutions

There are several reasons why corporate clients should perform timely bank reconciliations:

To protect against fraud:
According to recent reports, corporate America is experiencing record levels of check fraud. It is estimated that the cost of check fraud to U.S. companies, merchants and financial institutions is over $20 billion annually.

To catch internal errors and verify bank statements:
The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) places the burden on business clients to notify their bank -in a timely manner- of any statement irregularities that may indicate error or fraud.

To establish the accuracy and integrity of financial statements:
Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (enacted by the U.S. Congress in 2002) requires corporate management to acknowledge its responsibility for establishing and maintaining adequate internal anti-fraud programs and cash controls, including timely bank reconciliations.

Bank reconciliation, in its most simple terms, involves comparing a bank statement to internal records in order to explain differences between the two and examine discrepancies. Experts agree that bank reconciliation is a critical process in managing and controlling cash.

But manual cash reconciliations are tedious, costly, labor intensive and error-prone. As a result, many corporate clients fail to perform timely reconciliations and fail to identify possible irregularities - putting their company at risk.

While automation is an obvious conclusion, it is not a simple one. With over 1,300 U.S. commercial banks maintaining unique data formats, and hundreds of available accounting systems offering varied processing capabilities, automation has been hindered by a lack of standardization.

The key to successfully automating the bank reconciliation process involves facilitating communication between two diverse systems: the bank and the accounting package.

Treasury Software's BankReconciliation.com™ provides this unique capability. This solution offers an advanced matching engine that allows for both simple and complex matching between systems without the need for costly custom programming.

BankReconciliation.com provides a fast, accurate, easy, automated bank reconciliation solution for businesses of all sizes. The program allows clients to automatically match bank and general ledger data - as well as credit cards, CUSIP and other data- allowing exceptions to be easily tracked and resolved. Its public reporting edition satisfies the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404.

Treasury Software develops a range of cash management solutions for business including bank reconciliation, credit card reconciliation, ACH, positive pay, and BAI. Designated a Verified for Windows XP software application by Microsoft, Treasury Software is a Microsoft Certified Partner and Winner of the Gold Cup Award from CPA Software News. For more information: www.TreasurySoftware.com or 866-226-5732.