Modernizing your reconciliation processes

There’s a range of ways to improve month-end reconciliation processes, each of which offers meaningful time savings. The right approach for your business depends on your payment patterns, existing financial infrastructure and technical resources.  

1. Get better data

Use your banking platform to get better information on a reliable cadence. For example:  

• You can schedule J.P. Morgan Access to generate reports at the cadence that works best for your team (daily, weekly or aligned to close). You can also schedule transaction reports for automated delivery—including email distribution—at defined intervals. It’s important to align the file format specification with what your ERP ingests most effectively (e.g., CSV or BAI2).
• ACH Reconcilement Services breaks batched ACH entries into the underlying individual transactions. This gives your team clear visibility into each payment included in a batch (payer/payee and, when available, reference details), making it easier to match items to payables, reduce manual research and speed up reconciliation.
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) reporting delivers remittance/addenda details that travel with ACH payments in clear, easy-to-read formats. This enhances bank statement transaction data by providing richer payment context (e.g., invoice references, payer details and line-item information), which helps accelerate cash application, reduce manual research and support faster, more accurate reconciliation.
• Check account reconciliation reports provide visibility into checks paid, checks outstanding and exception items. Through our Full Account Reconciliation Plan services, we can transmit a fully reconciled file back to your ERP to streamline reconciliation and support a faster, cleaner month-end close. It can create significant time savings for businesses issuing a high volume of physical checks.
• Check Return Services alerts you when any check deposits are returned. This supports effective reconciliation and improves cash positioning by providing immediate visibility into exceptions so you can act quickly to follow up on receivables, reduce delays and minimize downstream processing impacts.

Work with your banker to identify and address the specific gaps slowing your reconciliation. 

2. Standardize how customers pay you

Inconsistent payment methods and remittance information are often the reason account receivable is harder to reconcile than accounts payable.

“When you don’t control how customers pay you, how they send you information and when they send it, you end up piecing together what it was for and how to apply it,” Jimenez said.

Companies that do this well standardize accepted payment methods and the information required with each payment. Communicate those expectations to both customers and your sales team, who may not realize flexible payment terms create accounting friction.

3. Automate receivables end-to-end

Full automation typically takes about two months to integrate and test, but for companies with sufficient payment volume, the time savings can be significant.

Encrypted connections between your bank and your accounting or ERP system are designed to help facilitate secure payments and receivables data flow and can help enable automatic matching and posting to open invoices—when the required remittance data is available and your ERP is configured to use it. Achieving this typically requires collaboration between your company, your bank and your ERP team.

“One client said it cut their reconciliation time in half and reduced errors,” Jimenez said.