“Coco has been a game-changer for our team in the prep of accounting work. We have nearly completely eliminated the manual hackwork on so many of our jobs, from asset reconciliations to preparing equity statements, which has saved the team hours of time per job.”
The biggest number in the practice
More accountant hours go into reconciling and preparing financial statements than into anything else we do. It is the core of the firm's work, and most of it is not thinking. It is checking.
Roughly 60 to 70 per cent of a financial statements job went on proving balances, GST back to the lodgements, receivables and payables back to the subledgers, assets back to the register. Large ledgers were checked line by line, the same figures re-keyed into the same schedules year after year. And every preparer's workpapers looked slightly different.
GST reconciliation was the one nobody volunteered for. The difference is usually small and always somewhere, and finding it meant working through the year transaction by transaction. It sat at the bottom of the pile, and was often the reason a set of accounts had not gone out.
What changed
Coco now runs the reconciliations in the background. It pulls data from the client's system, reconciles GST, receivables, payables and assets against their sources, and passes matched items through.
What comes back is not a finished answer. It is a short list of exceptions with the supporting detail attached. The routine work is done and the unresolved items are isolated for review.
Coco flags. An accountant judges. Every exception is still a human decision. What changed is that our accountants spend their time on the items that were genuinely unclear, instead of confirming the thousands that were never in doubt.
The target
“We set ourselves an 80 per cent reduction in the overall time a financial statements job takes. That is not a number anyone here would have entertained two years ago. Now it is a short-term goal.”
The personal touch of a human doesn't add anything to a standard reconciliation. The expert decisions and proactive advice is what clients pay for, and yet it is usually a rushed final 10 per cent of a job.
