Reconciliation Woes

Is this going to be a complaint session? Guess what? You are absolutely right!!!

One of the job hazards of being an accountant is at some point in time, regardless of which aspect of finance or accounting work you are doing, you will need to engage in some kind of reconciliation activity. It can involve tying numbers from one source to another, tying numbers among schedules, or tying numbers between years. It can come in ALL forms and formats and from ALL sources for ALL periods.

Since I started my first job about 4.5 years back, I have always been involved in different forms of reconciliation. From reconciling manual records to system records, system records to system records, sub ledgers to main ledgers, payments to statements of accounts, etc. To me, “reconciliation” is often associated with lots of headaches, nightmares and dread.

A change of working environment and a change of work scope did not relieve me of this drudgery. Now, I have to do reconciliation among similar sources, ie between manual records, between manual record and system and between systems. In addition, I have to reconcile numbers before elimination, elimination and post elimination. For someone who has not had consol experience, I practically was clueless on where I should start (Consol is a accounting term used for aggregating the accounts of related companies).

My latest challenge? To reconcile last year balances to this year’s and to quantify the financial impact of the changes in various parameters. This took me 2 weeks to do. I even had to come out with a simple example to determine how the numbers change with each parameter, so that I know what to subtract and what to multiply.

I hate reconciliation! Urrghh!!!