Blog Post
Mitigating Financial Risk with Automated Reconciliation
Financial risk isn't just about market volatility. The most insidious risks often come from within: process errors, lack of visibility, and fraud. Manual reconciliation creates "blind spots" where these risks can hide. Automated reconciliation shines a light on every transaction, providing the controls needed to secure your organization's financial health.
The Danger of Manual Processes
When you rely on Excel for reconciliation, you rely on humans not to make mistakes. But data entry errors, copy-paste failures, and broken formulas are inevitable.
More critically, manual processes lack segregation of duties. If the same person can edit the spreadsheet and approve it, there is no check against internal fraud.
How Automation Enhances Governance
Automated reconciliation software enforces strict internal controls that manual methods cannot match.
1. Immutable Audit Trails
In an automated system, every action is logged. If a user manually matches two transactions, the system records who did it, when, and why. This data cannot be deleted, satisfying even the strictest SOX compliance requirements.
2. Real-Time Fraud Detection
Automation runs daily, not monthly. This means anomalies—like a duplicate vendor payment or an unusual wire transfer—are flagged within 24 hours. Catching fraud early is the key to recovery.
3. Standardized Workflows
Software forces a standardized process. Users cannot "plug" a variance to make the sheet balance. Every discrepancy must be explained and approved before the account can be closed.
Building a Resilient Finance Function
Risk mitigation isn't a one-time project; it's a continuous discipline.
By implementing Reconwizz, you move from "detective controls" (finding errors after they happen) to "preventative controls" (stopping errors at the source).