An integral process of accounting, the month-end close is sometimes a challenge for organizations, often due to the high volume of work. Many companies are still using the manual status quo, which can be inefficient and present a barrier to an efficient and fast month end close. The manual process increases the chance of inaccurate data and inconsistent standards, resulting in a repetitive, costly, and time-consuming month-end close.
Having seen how many companies are struggling with the month-end close, experienced CPA and auditor Shagun Malhotra founded SkyStem LLC, an accounting technology company that aims to deliver powerful account reconciliation and financial close applications for enterprises. SkyStem's flagship offering is ART, an award-winning software-as-a-service product that transforms the close and account reconciliation process, giving accounting teams extensive insight into their balance sheet.
According to SkyStem, the manual process can become a problem for companies in various ways, such as losing documentation, or lack of standardization. The lack of a central repository of data can also be a problem, especially with many teams working remotely nowadays. When the time comes for auditing, the documentation is sometimes not available or there are different versions of a document, wasting both the accounting team's and auditors' time.
By automating up to 90% of the month-end close process, ART helps companies do away with extensive spreadsheets, back-and-forth emailing, and manual distractions. ART comes with several powerful workflow management and reporting tools to assist with the closing process, including account reconciliations, balance sheet flux and P&L variance analysis, and report generation. Through automation, ART can also help reduce the risk of fraud, as it makes it easier to see if everything lines up, as well as spot and correct any discrepancies.
ART is a system-agnostic solution that can easily be integrated into virtually all ERP systems without requiring extensive work from the company's IT team. Implementation takes just days, rather than months, and users can be trained in hours, not weeks.
ART has users in 17 countries across the world, with around 40% in the financial services industry. ART has won several awards, including Software Company of the Year in the Stevie Awards and Most Innovative Month-End Close Platform at the US Business News Technology Elite Awards. ART was also named Best in Class by the software review site Softwareworld.
Prior to Shagun founding SkyStem, she was hired by a publicly traded global financial services company to help it reconcile its books. The company faced serious compliance concerns from the auditors after the balance sheet was discovered to be off by over $4 billion. Out of the 10,000 general ledger accounts, many of them were not reconciled regularly, some were reconciled carelessly, and some were never reconciled. Furthermore, important documents were scattered among employee emails, shared drives, and personal desktops. The account reconciliation process itself was unnecessarily complex, labor-intensive, and driven by volumes of spreadsheets. Rebuilding this disjointed process cost millions of consulting dollars over 12 months. This experience inspired Shagun to found SkyStem and create ART.
"Having seen how month-end close and reconciliation tasks can throw a huge spanner in the works for companies, I knew there had to be an easier way," Shagun says. "This led me to found SkySystem and develop our flagship ART offering. Automation offers a host of benefits that will allow companies to focus more on their core businesses. We are a customer-centric company, which is why we ensured that ART is easily integrated into existing systems and easy to use. We believe that technology should cater to our client's team, instead of the other way around."
