Reconciliation is an important task for finance teams. It helps you ensure that the financial data in your chosen ERP system matches your third-party audit evidence. So far, so straightforward.
The problem is that card reconciliation is anything but straightforward for most businesses. London-based art fabrication company, MDM Props, told us that before moving to Payhawk for spend management, manually reconciling (including chasing receipts) used to take them 32 hours a week. That’s four working days!
The issues arise when the finance team can’t match the two sets of records for a number of reasons.
Issues with missing and disparate information are just the beginning. If you’re working in a finance team without a spend management solution (or with multiple disconnected solutions), you might find that the real work begins once you’ve finally gathered all of the missing paperwork. Now, you have to manually enter the data into your accounting software or ERP to ensure that it’s properly updated. This will take days. And that’s before you’ve even matched the records.
Businesses need to 1) capture data easily and 2) seamlessly sync it with the ERP or accounting software in order to save time and get perfect real-time visibility.
At Payhawk, we do both. Our software includes clever OCR technology that captures receipt and invoice data in seconds. And our superior integrations connect our solution with your accounting software or ERP of choice.
Our direct integration with NetSuite for example, follows our unique integration strategy which prioritizes seamless data synchronization to save our customers hours, and even days.
Our integration operates in accordance with the accruals concept by differentiating between the invoice/receipt and payment recognition dates, which means more accuracy and less work for our customers.
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With Payhawk, all of your relevant accounting fields are set up and synced to NetSuite automatically.
For customers getting connected is simple. Once they connect their NetSuite subsidiary to Payhawk they can:
We also export expenses automatically when they are marked as reviewed and export payments automatically when they are cleared or settled by the bank. Everything syncs seamlessly, saving time and effort.
Customers can set up Payhawk with NetSuite as they need using four key configurations; they can:
The optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) technology is data extraction made simple. It means that your cardholders can simply spend with their Payhawk card, take a photo of a receipt or upload a PDF invoice and the OCR will pull all of the relevant information out meaning there’s no tedious data entry for you and your finance team. What’s more, we work with the Google OCR so that we can read data in +65 languages, including Cyrillic.
We extract each of the following with the OCR capture:
Has someone forgotten to upload their receipt into the app? Missing receipts cause big headaches at the end of the month and make real-time reconciliation impossible. In the case of missing receipts, the Payhawk solution will automatically chase them to upload the missing information, saving the finance team even more time and effort.
And these missing receipts are a big deal. As Mathias Goetz, Senior Project Manager at ATU in Germany explained:
"We no longer have to chase receipts. Since using Payhawk, managers must simply take a picture of their receipt — thus digitizing it — and enter it into the automated finance system. In the first year, this change resulted in ATU recouping € 2 million from the tax office that would have otherwise been lost."
Keep your data flowing from first tap to month end.
If your reconciliations are still taking 32 hours a week, then we should talk. CFO, Giancarlo Bruni at London HQ’ed e-commerce company Heroes puts it best:
"Could we live without expense management and an ERP? Well, yes, but it would be like driving a 30-year-old car on its last legs — no comfort, no good experience, and definitely no speed. Maybe some businesses are happy to have a back office with 25 people punching in numbers, but it's not efficient, fast, or necessary. We prefer to automate, integrate, and save money on headcount!"
Save time and improve visibility and decision-making with real-time reconciliation. And direct your headcount to something more beneficial than 'punching in numbers.' Book a demo to find out more.
Trish Toovey works across the UK and US markets to craft content at Payhawk. Covering anything from ad copy to video scripting, Trish leans on a super varied background in copy and content creation for the finance, fashion, and travel industries.