Managing corporate finances is never easy. And if you are a billion-euro company, things can get complicated quickly, leading to mistakes.
A dairy company in the US was fined $5 million because of a missing comma, because of which drivers weren’t paid overtime wages. In another case, leading audit firms in the UK were penalised £43 million in 2019 for sub-standard audits.
But this shouldn’t be a surprise, given that 64% of companies still use spreadsheets to manage their finances.
And if you’re doing the same, it’s high time you ditch manual spreadsheets for more automated solutions. Still not convinced why you should do it?
In the spring of 2018, a major liquor and wine retailer in the UK lost 60% of its market value (around £500 million) in just a few weeks due to an arithmetic error in a spreadsheet!
But only a few financial platforms can support large businesses (those with more than €1 billion in revenue) in ensuring their data is accurate, complete, and substantiated. Aico is one such solution that can help you automate most of your period-end financial close tasks.
With Aico, you can automate account reconciliations, perform closing tasks, and post manual journal entries. As a result, you can complete your month-end closing faster, more effectively, and with greater accuracy. It also helps you manage intercompany accounting.
Sounds interesting, right? Let’s dig deeper into all the things Aico can do. But, before that, something about the company!
About Aico
Aico is a financial automation and management suite designed for the month-end close process that helps you save time and improve accuracy. Aico helps not only visualise the big picture of what is going on within your financial close but also helps your users automate manual and repetitive tasks. This, in turn, allows them to complete period-end closing tasks and post manual journal entries, accruals, and reconciliation accounts faster while complying with local laws.
What makes Aico better than other financial close platforms is its ability to integrate with ERP systems. Built originally by ERP consultants, the Aico product extensively uses APIs to integrate with leading ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle. It also provides the rest of the ERP market with granular and near real-time data exchange to ensure data accuracy.
In fact, the real value is achieved when you integrate Aico with your ERP system(s) and centralise and standardise your processes across the organisation. This way, all your employees work in a uniform process, and the data they enter (or clean) is reflected in the ERP in real-time, enhancing its position as the single source of truth for your financial data and health!
Once integrated, you can set up automation rules to enhance efficiency and productivity. For instance, you can automatically calculate accruals, reconcile accounts when there is no activity, and link evidence (such as approval email).
With such complete visibility and transparency in each stage of the process, you can centrally govern and meet ever-increasing compliance requirements.
In other words, Aico solves the four most significant problems of the financial closing process:
- Late reporting
- Data inaccuracy/master data errors
- Inability to verify compliance
- Out-of-control assets
Already impressed? We haven’t even discussed what makes it so powerful: its features, yet!
Key Features of Aico
1. Closing Task Manager
The Closing Task Manager in Aico is designed to speed up your month-end, quarter-end, and year-end close by as much as 50% and eliminate manual errors. At the same time, it improves visibility and transparency in the process.
For instance, it allows you to automatically set up configuration rules to create and send tasks to the right people at the right time.
Not sure where to start the automation? Well, Aico got you covered! It offers simple and configurable closing task templates. Choose the data that matters the most and add instructions for your team.
Additionally, you can organise the process and improve its efficiency using approval workflows. It allows you to set permissions on who can create, approve, and handle role workflows.
The best part? You only need to set these things once (although you can make changes as many times as you want).
Furthermore, the live dashboards in Aico enable you to monitor the status of all the closing tasks, their priority, the employees responsible for them, and if they are running behind schedule. This empowers the management to stay atop metrics that matter the most!
2. Journal Entries
Aico makes it easier to manage journal entries. You can do everything in one platform by creating, validating, and getting it approved. Here’s how.
- Aico allows you to upload your spreadsheet into its template to track the transactions automatically. Or you can create it from scratch by filling in the configurable templates.
- You can set up three journal entry approval workflow levels based on their type, value, and other factors. This enables you to monitor every journal entry while saving time.
- You can validate those entries against your ERP system in real-time. This helps ensure correct first-time entries, as they always comply with your ERP rules. It also helps ensure there are no fraudulent transactions.
- Its no-code automation rules help you create workflows for reversals and recurring journal entries, so employees don’t have to enter the same information every month.
And when it’s time to audit, you can find all your transactions (journal entries) in one place. You can even drill down to individual journal entries and check related data, supporting evidence, and approvals.
3. Account Reconciliations
Aico helps you standardise and track your reconciliation process based on corporate policies. For example, you can automate account reconciliations according to various account balance rules and use risk ratings to decide just how each account should be reconciled.
It comes with highly configurable templates where you can add custom fields and accounting segments. You can even link external documents and add instructions for reconcilers on the template.
If required, you can carry forward items (both open or reconciled) along with their supporting documents from a prior period to ensure accurate calculations.
As with other features, account reconciliations also come with an approval workflow. Select users responsible for preparing and approving account reconciliations and add due dates to ensure everything goes per the schedule.
You can even monitor account reconciliation status, balances, line items and other metrics in real-time via the Aico dashboard.
4. Intercompany Invoicing
Have offices in multiple countries? Do you do business with different entities of your organisation? Aico got you covered!
To ensure accurate financial reporting, you can create, approve, and match your intercompany transactions in the correct period. Aico also comes with hundreds of intercompany invoice templates to help you speed up the process. In addition, you can customise the header and fields per your business requirements.
Aico then matches the invoices against the corresponding journal entry in your sister company’s ledger to eliminate manual errors and fraudulent transactions.
Aico can even add relevant journal entries in your ERP every time an invoice is raised, so you don’t miss any necessary documents. Moreover, since it happens in real time, it improves visibility and transparency across the organisation and its subsidiaries.
5. Manual Payments
Companies often work with vendors on a one-off basis. Therefore, any misclassification could result in paying those vendors multiple times, costing millions of euros. However, with Aico, you don’t have to worry about it.
Its easy-to-configure payment workflows require supporting documents based on your internal control guidelines to process payments. This drastically reduces the risk of fraudulent transactions.
Aico also automatically creates PAIN files after thoroughly analysing approved manual payment documents. Once it is ready, it cannot be modified and is securely passed to the payment gateway system.
Post payment, Aico creates journal entries into your ERP system. You can specify the necessary segments you want to add to the general ledger, and Aico will do it.
6. Financial Requests
Reduce the number of emails you send for financial requests, including invoicing requests, payment requests, and master data change requests. Aico’s customisable workflows allow you to simplify your processes by bringing all the requests to one dashboard.
You can choose the mandatory fields in the request templates to ensure the data is complete and accurate. This also helps validate the invoices against your ERP system, eliminating the risk of fraud.
You can view and manage the progress of these requests in real-time via your dashboard. This helps move the invoices faster and with minimal emails.
The requests are usually made for (but are not limited to):
- Vendor opening
- Account and other accounting segment opening
- Manual period opening & closing
- Fixed asset request
- Reminder letters to customers
- Journal entry request
- Credit releases
- GL account clearing
- Internal Order
- Sales agreements
- Sales orders
- Purchase orders
The Final Verdict
Aico brings your business’s finances to one place by integrating with your ERP system. It tracks every transaction, be it recurring or one-off manual payments, and ensures your journal entries match your account statements.
Aico also empowers you to streamline your financial closing process, automate tedious tasks, and ensure compliance with local laws. In addition, it enables your finance team to attach and verify the documents during the audit and prevent fraudulent transactions.
Leading European enterprises, such as AkzoNobel, Bonnier, JDE Coffee, and SKF, are already taking advantage of Aico automation, and you can too!
However, consider if its features are what you’re looking for before investing in it. This will help you choose the right solution for your business while saving time and money in doing so!
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