What does your supplier reconciliation template look like?

Many organisations’ supplier reconciliation template is simple; watch the pile of statements getting bigger in the corner of the office in the hope they go away. Does that sound familiar? Accounts Payable barely have the time to get invoices onto the system, chase business users to do their job and answer calls from suppliers, so you can see why reconciling the ever growing pile of statements gets put to the back of the queue. The most common supplier reconciliation template we come across is someone will quickly eyeball statements to look for any with aged items and/or credit notes. Aged invoices on the statement could mean you are missing a liability or at risk of being put on stop with an important supplier. Credit notes are important as they have a positive impact on the P&L and you want to make sure none of them are missed. Some accounts payable departments also have agreements in place with their auditors or internal business units to reconcile key suppliers every month. Key suppliers could be defined as Top X suppliers by value of spend and reconciling them every month is a big ask when these suppliers will invariably be the ones who send the most invoices. Ontop of that, all large organisations will have to prove to their auditors their top suppliers have been reconciled, which is an additional burden on an already busy accounts payable department at year end.

So what is the answer? Some departments develop a supplier reconciliation excel template. This enables a user to download the ledger for a vendor into Excel for reconciliation to the suppliers statement using vlookup’s. This is fine except that not all vendors provide their statements in excel format, so you still have to manually reconcile the paper and pdf statements. Supplier reconciliation template in Excel format are also generally limited to making sure all of the documents on the statement are on the ledger. What about documents you have on the ledger that are on the statement even though they pre-date the statement? These are potential duplicates or miss-postings. What about documents on a statement that are posted against another vendor account because you have multiple accounts for the same vendor?

There is just enough time in the day to manually reconcile statements to find all the exceptions, so our answer is to automate the reconciliation process to free up the time you need to actually manage the exceptions. Here’s how we do it:

1. Upload paper, pdf and Excel statements to Statement-Matching.com.

2. Statements are automatically reconciled with a status allocated. Via the Search Screen; users can select statements at different statuses or ‘Show Significant Exceptions only, which are statements containing items with a potential positive impact to the P&L eg. Missing credits, incorrect amounts (higher on the ledger), potential duplicates etc…:

3. Go and look at the statements in detail, see Search Results screen below.

4. Double-clicking a statement takes us to the details of the rec, see below.

5. What does the vendor see when you email them from StatementMatching.com? Screenshot of the PDF shown below provides invoice status information to the supplier. Copy requests for missing documents, due dates for invoices that free for payment and check numbers/payment references for paid invoices. This saves the supplier ringing you up asking have you got my invoice and when are you going to pay for it? 

6. StatementMatching.com also saves you time at the end of year audit when you have to produce detailed audit reports for your top vendors. We took what our customers were already generating manually and got the system to do it, see below for an example: 

If you would like to try our supplier reconciliation template then contact us to arrange a free trial, request a live demonstration or just ask some questions. You can also read a case study.