Demo: AI-Powered Account Reconciliations

Hello, and welcome, everyone. We're going to give folks just another moment to get settled and logged in, and then we'll get started.

Alright. Looks like we have a great group dialed in.

Thank you so much for joining us for today's demo of AI powered account reconciliations. My name is Najla Brown, and I'll be your moderator for today's session.

Before we officially kick off, just a few quick housekeeping items. First, today's session is being recorded, so you'll receive a copy of this presentation in your inbox.

On the right hand side of your screen, you'll see the q and a tab. Please submit your questions there at any time.

They'll come straight to myself and our speakers, and we'll address them at the end. Finally, you'll see a docs tab in that same panel.

I highly encourage you to check out that for direct links to resources you can save or explore later. And with that, let's dive right in.

I'm excited to introduce our speakers today. Tina Heismann, our senior product marketing manager for financial close and consolidation, is based in Austin, Texas.

Tina brings over twenty five years of combined experience across corporate finance and internal audit roles as well as performance management software. Joining her is Derek Henry, a senior solutions consultant based in Dallas, Texas.

Derek also brings a strong background in corporate finance, having started his career as an auditor and controller before pivoting to solutions consulting where he has guided hundreds of financial software evaluations. Tina, the mic is all yours.

02:48 - 11:20

Thank you, Najla, and welcome everyone to our session on account reconciliations and the close. And so, I wanna talk a little bit first about, what how we're gonna spend the next half hour.

And so we're going to, first, talk a little bit about account reconciliations and and the part that they play in the modern close, modern close. Then we're going to, have Derek take us inside of OneStream's account reconciliation solution and really, see some exciting things, that can improve your account reconciliation process.

And after that, we're going to cover OneStream's vision for modern finance and what the OneStream platform really is. And finally, time permitting, we're gonna take some questions from the audience.

So let's go ahead and get started. Let's talk about account reconciliation and the part that it plays in achieving a modern financial close.

I think it's worth, you know, kinda taking a look at what's happening in finance and accounting and how, it's evolving. So first of all, from a core to digital finance.

So that's basically from users of technology to producers with technology. Think about that for a minute.

You're not just using technology. You're actually using technology to produce outputs.

And you have to have an athlete's mindset as you're thinking about how you're going to go about this. It's really freeing up capacity for leadership, judgment, and strategy.

You have to have a strategy moving forward. Digital digital finance talent is set to double from five to 10% in the next four to five years, and yet 79% of CFOs say their finance employees must update how they see their jobs.

They really need to have a different mindset moving forward. Secondly, they really need to be able to embrace AI enabled technology for efficiency.

You know, it's things like applying autonomous accounting for an on demand close to really automate the the manual tasks and continually monitor KPIs for early detection of any issues. So, really, you know, finding things as they happen and not waiting until the end of the month like we used to.

There's not enough time for that, and it's not effective. And yet seventy seven percent of CFOs cite a lack of technical skills as a key reason why they still haven't adopted AI.

Finally, drive toward a more modern financial close, continuous modern financial close. 81% of organizations still can't close their books today in under five days.

They're still stuck in that monthly and quarterly mindset, and we really need to shift away from that to a daily continuous process. And by 2028, Gartner says that 60% of low value accounting activities will be replaced by autonomous AI.

So think about that for a minute. So when we think about speaking of low value activities, let's talk about some of the challenges that people might be having in their, current traditional manual, account reconciliation process.

You know, what what parts of the process are keeping us from the modern close, and what are the risks involved in continuing to work that way? I mean, reconciliations today mean manual review making it difficult to scale, and it buries your team in that low value work, that really isn't necessary anymore. Static rule based checks, they only take you so far.

You're missing the exceptions that really matter, and those exceptions change over time. They're not always the same.

You know, they're different anomalies, unusual account behavior, perhaps a sign difference. You know, until you see them, until you uncover them, you don't really know if you're if you're seeing all of your errors, and that eventually could possibly lead to fraud.

Missing documentation creates audit exposure. Nobody wants that.

And limited limited reporting, leaves leadership really kind of flying blind. They don't know what's happening.

A slower close, missed exceptions, error fraud, audit exposure, poor visibility, all compounding, and that's the cost of staring staying where you are today. So let's take a look at what a modern reconciliation process looks like.

With OneStream, balances auto load. Low risk accounts auto certify, so your team touches only the exceptions that matter, and the close gets faster and less costly, more efficient.

Sensible AI models, purpose built for finance, can surface risk automatically. You don't need a data science team in order to do that.

And running continuously to catch different anomalies before they become a problem, before there's a misstatement there. And a complete audit trail keeps you audit ready every period, and one shared data model across close consolidation and reporting gives you one version of the truth and real time insight into what's happening.

A faster close, smarter focus, earlier detection, audit ready compliance, real time visibility, the shift from an end of month scramble to a continuous confident close. So what does a confident or what does a modern close require? When we really think about the modern close, we really think about, six different, what I call, imperatives to the modern close.

And the first is having a technology enabled continuous approach, to period end accounting and finance, and that's continuous. Tasks are broken down and performed throughout the month rather than waiting till that week of close and and scrambling to get everything done and maybe missing important, important things that have come up.

Automated. So the more you can automate routine, high volume tasks, think of a lot of the low value, like reconciliation, matching, journal adjustments, those are automated, and it really allows you to focus on exceptions, anomalies, analysis, and forecasting.

Unified. So with OneStream, all close and consolidation activities are performed in a single platform, ensuring a seamless flow of data to streamline and shorten the close.

Real time. We all know how important real time is.

So with ongoing visibility into KPIs, cash flow, and discrepancies, you can resolve things as they occur, not wait until the end of the month. Strategic.

Let's turn accountants from record keepers into value creators, support supporting better planning, decision making, and improving collaboration across departments. And let's not forget the human centered piece.

I mean, really reducing that month end crunch time pressure. Nobody wants to be in the office on a Friday night at 10:00, you know, trying to to get the close done.

A modern close really improves that work life balance and your team satisfaction. So everyone starts to become strategic partners in the business.

So now with that in mind, let's turn it over to, Derek for a look at what the account reconciliation process can look like inside of OneStream. Derek?

11:20 - 25:31

Awesome. Thanks for the great overview, Tina.

So I'm going to start sharing my screen. Let me stop sharing the slides here.

Okay. Now you guys should be seeing my screen that has a dashboard of the different modern modern financial close elements in it.

Right? So a couple things that stick out here is that one in one stream, you can make this look like whatever you want. So we've got a couple of different things go on.

There there's task management at the top. There's a daily kind of a matching process that's running that you can keep on top of.

There's journal entries, and then at the bottom, you're seeing, reconciliations. Over here on the side is the is the navigation elements that you have the power to control.

So just give you that quick overview. This is something you have a lot of flexibility on what you want it to look like.

Maybe add some key reports down below that or other processes you wanna link out to. But today's focus is reconciliations.

And before we go over there, just wanna call out that at the top right is where our anomaly detection has kinda surfaced four different items. You wanna click through that.

You can see what those are right away if you want to. So if I was, controller like I was in my past life, I would definitely probably be interested in that.

But just to orient you on what we're looking at in reconciliations, first of all, you can have your own KPIs and analysis and dashboards specific to reconciliations if you you want. So where are things that in process approval? Where are things at risk based on entity or due date or whatever you really wanna see? This is very flexible to throw in things that you wanna see such as maybe what items are really aged that we need to focus on right away at the beginning of close or the, you know, toward the end when we're almost done.

But where most people spend their time in reconciliations, it's just looking at the grid to see what reqs do we have. Notice over here we have what reqs, they're kind of the status of all the reqs.

So a little over 300 here and most of them are done. Few few I do here.

Now when we click on one of these items here so we'll look at an example here. This happens to be a cash account.

We've got a few that are different approaches at cash accounts. When you click on the rec, you're gonna see the different items and some other attributes of the rec at the bottom.

We can make that a little bigger if you want to. So it's very item focused.

Okay? Now the first one here has a balance item that has, you know, 393,000. The GL says $2.

66. So we do have a little bit of an unexplained difference there in red that we need to account for.

And over here, it shows you where it's set in status, how many approvals we would need. These are all configurable things that you have.

One of the things you can do is pull items from previous periods. Because if you have items that don't tend to change a lot, you can reuse those, makes it efficient.

We're not even talking about AI yet, several efficiency features. We'll get there.

Don't worry. We can pull those in and say, hey.

Now we've got nothing left to explain. We're gonna go.

We can reuse things, the exact same things or use similar things and then edit them if you wanna use them as a starting point. In this case, we're gonna use the exact same ones.

And if you try to prepare, k, it's gonna tell you that, hey. You need a an attachment here and you need to add, comments on items that are over sixty days old.

What I don't want you to miss is how incredibly helpful that is. I think Tana mentioned earlier when she was going through the overview that there's so many steps manually reviewing that you have to make sure that all those little things are completing policy effectively, such as aged items, having having some type of, explanation.

So what I might say here is we'll clear in July. And just for the sake of, you know, getting through a quick demo, we'll use that again.

So once we click save and then the other the other warning we got there is saying, hey. We we need to have an attachment here.

So we're gonna add a let's see. We'll use a bank statement right there.

Okay? So if we try to save or try to prepare this time, now we're gonna be prompted with our certification checklist. You can always view that to see what it really is, add some more commentary if you want, and then sign off.

Okay? So what we've seen so far is you're looking to reuse items and the ability to put very targeted validation items. I've never seen any other closed software that can do it like this.

It could be very targeted or they could be global. The idea is it's kinda like working it's it's kind of traffic.

You have stop signs, which rely on people to facilitate. They get very frustrating when you when you come up to those or traffic light or technology is facilitating the flow.

And having spent time as controller, I could tell you that traffic lights work a lot better when you're letting technology drive the process. So there's one example.

We'll get to a little to a couple other ones real quickly here. Another one is showing how nicely OneStream plays with Excel.

I'm an Excel nut. It's something I've used a lot of my career.

Having get gotten really deep into it has really helped me, progress and do a lot of cool fun things. A lot of people are using Excel for their recs.

And to some extent, they might wanna keep a lot of details, but they wanna bring in some level of details so they can track items that are reconciling or maybe categorical items, etcetera. So the way that we accomplish this in OneStream is with templates.

So you might have a really good cash template or an AR template or fixed assets or a template that's really tied to a specific account that you have. That's great.

We'll just throw a little metadata in there, link it to show where the data is gonna flow into OneStream, and it'll act a lot like this. So we're gonna jump into bring in a file here.

We're gonna use this file right here. And, of course, I have it open.

So let me show you what that file looks like real quick just so you have an idea. There's a summary sheet here that has all these items right here.

Those are the ones gonna be brought into OneStream. And in the Excel file, they're linked to different levels of details.

So we've got deposits, wires, checks, wires out, etcetera. We really want this level of detail to be directly in one stream.

The rest of it can sit in this Excel file. Just to let you know what that looks like, it could look completely different if you wanted to.

But that's our example file that we have here just so you're oriented with what I'm bringing in one stream. And once you do that, one, the file over here on the right is going to be imported.

And in all these items, what types they are, the names that, importantly, the date, which is gonna drive the aging as well as the amount and the currency, those are all gonna be imported right away with just a couple of clicks. Much easier than other solutions I've used in the past that need need you to map things and go through all these steps to make it work.

Notice that these are tea items because they were brought in via a template, and that might drive different levels of automation. If something came in just manually or versus a template like this, then it might be that you want it to auto certify or not.

K? So we could then, certify this one if we wanted to. Now one other example that really starts to differentiate what we do in OneStream is the ability to link out to other items.

So this particular rec is, AR is a group of recs so that you come over here and see the child reconciliations if you wanted to, and we've connected that to the subledger. So there's eight or so GL accounts.

There's eight or so subledgers being tied into this. You can see that because it has the b item type.

And it is automatically certified when we run our auto certified routine, which could be scheduled or run on demand. So there's nothing unexplained.

Now that's great for the tile aspect, but what about the quality of that account? Well, we have the ability to do what is called a VCheck and go over to a workspace for AR. Okay? So what this is gonna show us as we come over here to our workspace here, let me go back into it a different way.

What this is gonna do is show us all kinds of dashboards related to AR that we might have to hop to one or more ERPs to be able to see. So over here on the on the top left here, you've got different aging for one system or it could be all of them.

There's a little chart, kinda looks like Pac Man over here breaking it down if you wanted to see that. There are charts that show the top 20 customers or customers per number of invoices if you wanted to drill into that.

And at the bottom, you have all of the detail. If that level of detail is brought into OneStream from one or more ERPs, you have that all in one place that you can analyze.

And then if you wanted to, you could look into the details of all those and even leave notes. So if you wanted to leave commentary around some of the biggest items that are, say, over a hundred days outstanding, you can absolutely do that.

If you have a lot of those items and AR is a strategic part of your business, then you probably wanna have purpose built software for that. But in OneStream, you do have the ability to collect commentary like that and make this a more strategic approach.

Back to Tina's comment earlier, how we make this more strategic. So whether it's dashboards, full on details, you can go further than just the tile nature of your account reps.

Now we do more than this. We can do matching.

So I'll quickly just show this. We won't really work on it, but having a daily continuous process like Tina said earlier, that is absolutely going to power an efficient process so that you can look at exceptions on day one, not on day one during close after things have happened.

Because when you look at things very quickly, you can resolve them quickly and you're just always ready. And it frees time up during close for other strategic and more value add items.

Now one of the other things we wanted to cover because after all, this is AI powered account recs. Our signature feature there that is AI powered is called anomaly detection.

Now what I'm gonna do is unfilter this first column here of of the most common demo examples we use. And every year, if we wanted to look at some of these that have anomalies, this is gonna show us things like, hey, there are more or less items attached in the last time.

There might be more rejections or maybe the the sign is flipped. So as an example here, the number of rep detail items increased compared to historical usage.

Okay? So we might indicate that's reviewed and it's totally fine. You might also say that the average aging days has decreased.

So that might be a good thing. You might not care about that.

That's okay. These are just examples of how you might, leverage that, and it just goes above and beyond all the rule sets that you can have.

So in OneStream, the the validation rules we looked at earlier, you can define your own auto certification rules. You can do the matching rules.

Those are all great and deterministic, and I would absolutely recommend you to use those wherever you can. But when it comes to what else can we do, how else can we come through all this data and find things that are a little bit maybe not what we want, anomaly detection is great for that.

I'm wanna show you what it looks like just kinda save the shortcut here with another demo instance of how we give you the power to do this. A lot of AI tools that I have used or played with or or learned about tend to be a black box where you don't understand what's going on there.

So what we're seeing here in OneStream shows you how transparent and how you own this. Okay? So at the top here, we have what's called anomaly detectors.

Okay? Things like document sparsity. Do we have documentation, supporting the recs or the items within them? Is the sign different? Is the item documentation sparse? You know, age items, etcetera, the number of items, the number of rejections, etcetera.

So you have the ability with all the different settings here to say, here are the different ways we wanna leverage these anomaly detectors. And then how do we put them in place? That's at the bottom here.

So you're gonna pick what detector type you want. K? You're gonna give it a description if you wanna explain that to people because after all, the preparers are gonna sometimes see these when they do hit.

What severity level do you wanna give it? Because it might be that if it's a critical item, you might want the team to be forced to give some type of commentary or address it before they can certify. And then over here, the data syntax, I don't want you to want you to be overwhelmed with what that means.

It's basically just giving you the power to get specific with this. Okay? So given the detector type and what other attributes you have within the reconciliations themselves, how specific or how broad that we wanna apply that rule.

The key behind this is you get to own how these work. So if you're getting a whole bunch of false positives, then put some more logic in place here.

Maybe some of these you you reel back or if you're not seeing a lot of anomalies and you think you probably should, then add more of these. Right? Get more, specific in what you're looking for or more broad or whatever it is that you're trying to do to achieve your goals.

Now what does this all mean? There's a lot of cool things we do in close in one stream. So I'm gonna come over here and I've got a little wrap up slide that I'll show you with this and then turn it back over to Tina.

Having spent time with a lot of different pieces of software in the closed space of my career, you know, you get to know that, there are several different several different factors people are looking for within closed. So just be able to track things like reconciliations or tasks or journal entries, whatever, being able to connect to other systems, the workflow controls, and then just keeping things organized and having the visibility to see what's going on.

These are really, really important things when it comes to tracking your close and all the other things that accountants tend to do month in and month out. OneStream does all those things really well as we've we've seen kinda sum up throughout this brief demonstration, but where we start to differentiate is that everything's in one place.

So well beyond the close, we can do consolidations. We can do really, really good reporting.

We can do planning and things like that. We can get very specific in the way you wanna consume the data.

So the KPIs, the dashboards, the one I started with that has everything, the one with specific to Rex, etcetera. You can put more logic in place in one stream.

If you remember the analogy to a stop sign versus a traffic light where we put in the validation checks, that is something that you can do, well deeper than any other software I've ever seen. It goes much further than that.

And then most importantly, here, and I'll make that green just to emphasize it, is we can let you go beyond the tile nature of accounting and make it more strategic. So if you remember that that workspace I went to that showed a lot deeper AR than just, hey.

Well, the balance sheet or the the GL matches the the subledger. We can go so much deeper and really start to answer questions, be more strategic, and help support the rest of the business.

So with that, I'm gonna turn it back over to Tina so we can get just a little bit more of the overview of how OneStream works, And then maybe we'll answer some of the questions you we've been accumulating in the background here. Sorry.

I think I think I jumped the ball on you, Tina.

25:31 - 30:04

You're okay. Thank you, Derek.

And that was excellent. And, as a recovering, I guess, you could say, accountant and auditor, it almost makes me wanna go back to that role because, honestly, the anomaly detection excellent, look into account reconciliation.

So we're gonna take a few minutes just to talk about OneStream as a whole and who we are and, and what we do. And so, you know, at OneStream, you know, you've heard a lot today about the modern financial close and how account reconciliation is a critical piece of that.

But let's get to know OneStream a little bit better. Our goal is simple.

We wanna be the operating system for modern finance. That's it.

So how do we do that? At OneStream, we're uniquely unified. I'm gonna say that again.

Uniquely unified, infinitely extensible, and AI powered. I'm gonna talk about what all of that means.

But that's what sets OneStream apart. OneStream is uniquely positioned in the market with the only unified platform, not a point solution, not a suite of solutions packaged together, a unified platform with one data model so everyone is working with the same data, creating one version of the truth.

You're not reconciling data across multiple systems. It's a faster close, confidence in every number.

Infinitely extensible. So you can look at your business at whatever level of detail is required.

And finally, AI powered, to make sure you're staying ahead of the curve with anomaly detection, predictive capabilities, and AI agents to assist you in running your business. This is what your blueprint should be for becoming a modern finance org.

So as you take a look at the slide here and you can see in the center, of course, unified data is, you know, the the backbone of all of this, but we really have, it broken out into three pillars. Right? What you must do.

So think about things like core finance consolidation reporting, FP and A. Those are the traditional core things you need to be able to do to run your business.

But then we also have what do we really wanna be doing? What's really making a big difference for us? And those could be things like workforce planning where you're starting to plan out, at a very detailed level by employee or per per excuse me. Perhaps it's sales performance management.

So a lot of different, capabilities, and that's really where, the infinite extensibility comes in is you can manage your business and forecast your business at the level of detail that makes the most sense for you. And then finally, what do we need? What we really need is help in the way of AI.

Right? This is what's gonna help you be able to drive your business forward. It's gonna be able to uncover patterns that you may not have the time, or the ability to be able to to process all of that information and also help you predict better outcomes for your business.

So when you really think about it, OneStream is the only platform that allows you to take finance further. So Derek and I have talked a lot today about modern finance account reconciliation and who OneStream is.

But now, you know, I've been keeping an eye on the chat, and there's a lot of great questions there. So, let's hear from the audience.

And so, Derek, lot of questions in the chat. I'm gonna ask you to take on some of these, responses for us.

So let's go ahead first. Let's see.

What do we have for our first question? Do I have to implement consolidations first, or can I start with the account reconciliations?

30:04 - 30:38

You certainly don't have to. That that's pretty traditional.

We're pretty strong in consolidations, so people know us for that. When we put together the fund Modern Financial close, there will be some aspects of the structures, the overall hierarchy or skeleton, if you will, of the system that will support consolidations being a little bit more efficient and vice versa.

So if you already have consolidations in place, You're already probably getting your trial balances in to power your consolidated results. So a lot of those structures in place, your account hierarchy, maybe some of the other stuff that you're using.

So you absolutely can start with it just like any other solution can do with account regs.

30:38 - 30:56

Excellent. That's good to know.

Let's see what else do we have here. Oh, this looks like a good one.

So our ERP is SAP, and I know that BlackLine works well with SAP. What about OneStream? Can I use that with my SAP?

30:56 - 31:28

Absolutely. So we've got direct connections with SAP just like other systems, and we're we're constantly building those out.

You can bring in data from pretty much any system into OneStream. So it can be a flat file, it can be an Excel file, a direct connection, API based.

So we're we're not really limited there. In fact, there's this the data, wizard of bringing data into OneStream and be able to to validate that it's correct, that it's mapped, everything, to transform it, you know, add add columns, filtering, whatever you wanna do is gonna be stronger in OneStream than than other solutions that that do close stuff.

31:28 - 32:01

Okay. Excellent.

Let's see. Oh, okay.

I think I'm gonna go with this question because I'm curious to know, the answer. Derek, you have, obviously, great experience, previously as a controller, and you've used different closed management solutions.

So, can you talk about, what benefits you've seen from using this closed solution?

32:01 - 33:02

Definitely. So, I mean, the big three three things I look for in software is efficiency or automation, visibility, and in enhancing controls.

And I think we saw elements of all those today. You know, when we get into a more broad demonstration, it's tailored to to your business, then then it's gonna even shine more.

I think that visibility, you know, knowing exactly what to do if you're leading a company, knowing where are the risks, where do we need to focus our time and our resources amongst the team. If you're a doer, then what needs to be done for the day? That that is friction in a lot of cases, whether you're not using anything other than Excel today or you're using a solution that's just a little limited there.

From automation, I mean, we can put all kinds of logic in place to automate that this x tied to y and z and, you know, here's what we need to do because of that or whatever, and then just control. You saw the the validation controls we did earlier today.

There are many many other examples of that where there's audit trail continuously, etcetera. I always look for those three things and OneStream just shines in how much further you can go than other solutions that I've used in the past.

33:02 - 33:52

Okay. That's great.

And I always love to hear somebody else's, perspective on that as I'm sure the audience appreciated that as well. Sure.

So and thank you to everyone in the audience, for participating and for the great questions, that you submitted. Unfortunately, we are running out of time to answer all of the questions here.

So our team will be following following up, with you directly via email to make sure that all of the questions that were asked here today get answered. And as a reminder, make sure that you scan the QR code that you see on your screen right here.

It will take you to 1stream. com, and you can learn more about the modern financial close and other things that we've talked about today.

Thank you again for your participation, and I hope everyone has a great day.

33:52 - 33:54

Yeah. Have a great rest of your day.

Y'all take care.