Whether you work for a company that prepares its financial statements in-house, or you’re a lawyer or accountant doing this for clients, or you’re an auditor who audits manually prepared accounts, you will be painfully familiar with the burden it is to prepare the financial statements and their appendices manually.
That’s why we were hired to automate this process!
The problem
“Every year we prepare the financial statements for hundreds of client portfolio companies. This means hundreds of appendices that we prepare manually by going back and forth between our Excel worksheets, the trial balances, and other supporting documents, to make sure we capture all information correctly into the appendices. Unsurprisingly, this is taking us weeks to complete and review and the risk of manual error is just so huge that every year we dread this period because it’s always so stressful for the whole team .”
The Solution
A robot asks for the entity’s prior year appendices, current year trial, and all other supporting documents. Using a pre-configured Excel template, it completes all tabs within the template by populating each field with the correct amount, entity name(s), or date. This is performed using a pre-configured mapping which determines which FS line corresponds to which TB codes. It also performs all necessary calculations.
How it works? ... in 4 Simple Steps
1. Robot asks you to provide all required files
To start the process all you need to do is provide the robot with the files that contain all the information that is needed to complete the appendices. This includes prior year appendices, current year trial balance, interest of ISL, and others.
2. Robot extracts all required information
The robot picks up all the required information from the different documents. This is pre-configured in the robot’s logic so it knows exactly what details to extract every time it runs.
3. Robot completes the template & updates all dates
After the data is extracted, the robot populates the template. This includes all amounts corresponding to the various financial statement lines in order to complete all appendices.
It also updates all dates within the template, updates for FX rates where necessary, and completes all entity name(s), including relevant subsidiary names (using prior year appendix information).
4. Robot generates the completed Appendix file
To complete the process, the robot pushes a Dialog window where you click to see the newly prepared Appendix file for entity XXX. All you have to do is sense check.
The robot completes this in 1 minute per entity. It now saves our client 1 full month of work since they had hundreds of entities to prepare financial statement appendices for. Pretty great, no?!
Why bother automate your Financial Statement Appendices?
Save time
A robot is able to prepare an entity's appendices in 60 seconds and provide you with a summary of any information it couldn't find, meaning all you have to do is investigate the exceptions (if any).
Reduce error
Focusing on a manual task for hours is tiring and boring so the scope for error is huge. A robot doesn't get tired and works with 100% accuracy to prepare all appendices in a few seconds or minutes.
Smarter Operations
The robot works in the background so you can easily continue doing other value-adding work whilst the robot does the rest. That way you do the valuable job whilst the robot handles the admin.
Ready to automate your Financial Statement Appendices
Let's talk about the preparation of your appendices and see how we can automate them best 🙂
