Best Account Reconciliation Software Tools - Vena

The longer it takes to close out your books for the previous month and obtain the latest figures for the business, the less relevant those numbers become for decision making.  

One factor that could be influencing the speed of your monthly close or year-end close is how long your team spends on account reconciliation—the process of matching and validating your General Ledger (GL) balances to internal and external sources. 

That's why many businesses look to account reconciliation software to help them manage the process more efficiently. These solutions enable you to have a faster and more accurate close, in turn bolstering your organization’s confidence in the data you report. 

So what should you look for in account reconciliation software? How will you know which tool is the best fit for your organization’s unique needs?  

We’ve compiled user feedback from industry-leading peer review platforms on nine of the best account reconciliation solutions available on the market to give you a rundown of the pros and cons of each. First, here's a quick look at 9 quality account reconciliation tools.  

Overview of the 9 Best Account Reconciliation Software for FP&A Teams

1. Vena
2. Oracle Fusion Cloud 
3. BlackLine
4. OneStream
5. Planful
6. Trintech
7. FloQast
8. Prophix
9. IBM Cognos Controller

What Is Account Reconciliation?

But first, let’s dig into why an efficient account reconciliation process matters in the first place. 

Account reconciliation is the process of matching and validating your General Ledger (GL) balances to internal and external sources or other independent calculations. 

Businesses conduct account reconciliations at the end of reporting periods, whether monthly, quarterly or annually. This practice ensures that every account in the general ledger aligns with its corresponding sub-ledger or external transaction system, guaranteeing the accuracy of your actuals. 

Why is Account Reconciliation Important?

The account reconciliation process serves as the foundation for timely and precise reporting of your organization's financial performance. It establishes essential internal controls to safeguard company assets, validates numbers before issuing financial statements and enhances internal transparency for regulatory reporting. 

Neglecting the account reconciliation process can lead to ambiguity and discrepancies, causing: 

• Delays in period-end reporting
• Time wasted adjusting journal entries to balance accounts
• Lack of adherence to accounting standards due to cutting corners to meet reporting deadlines
• Elevated risk of fraud due to an absence of internal controls and transparency  

Benefits of Using Account Reconciliation Software  

Reconciling your accounts manually can be extremely difficult due to the work required to retrieve supporting data from all your sources (such as your ERP, GL and subledgers) and coordinate inputs and approvals from your various team members. 

Getting a dedicated software to manage all the supporting processes involved in account reconciliation can address these challenges and improve compliance, accuracy and efficiency as a result. 

Let’s explore some of the benefits of account reconciliation software further: 

Shorter Close Cycle Enables Faster Decisions 

When you’re manually compiling and updating your actuals every month, you’ll lose time searching spreadsheets and external documentation for the numbers you need, copying and pasting numbers to roll your financials forward and keeping track of so many disparate templates. 

If your business has many complex accounts and entities in your ERPs, general ledgers and sub-ledgers, you’ll lose even more time. 

Account reconciliation software can help you accelerate your financial close by streamlining account matching and account validation. With pre-configured logic, workflow standardization and automated status reports and notifications, you can reroute journal entries for review faster and secure approvals sooner. 

More Accurate Data Enables Better Decision Making  

Manual processes are prone to human error. If you’re tediously performing data entry and copying and pasting values into your spreadsheets, it’s inevitable your financials will be inaccurate. 

If those incorrect numbers were noticed before reporting, you’ll spend more time reworking those spreadsheets and scouring external documentation for the right numbers. And if those incorrect numbers weren’t caught until after reporting, then your recommendations given to your executive leaders—and the decisions they made—were based on misguided analysis. 

With account reconciliation software, the integrations between your ERP and your general ledger and sub-ledgers establish a single source of truth to ensure data accuracy. This prevents discrepancies that lead to wasting time on back-and-forth reviews and approvals, and ensures analysis—and decisions—are based on data that your leaders can trust. 

Transparent Processes Enable Stakeholder Confidence 

Your internal and external stakeholders need visibility into your company’s true financial health—whether that’s delivered through financial statements, audits or regulatory and management reports.

Without an effectively managed account reconciliation process, it’s difficult to provide this much-needed transparency, especially for adjusting entries and explanatory file attachments. This ultimately leads to inconsistent processes and unmet accounting standards. 

The right account reconciliation software can solve this, by providing a central interface where you can track every reconciled and unreconciled account, as well as the segregation of duties between preparer and reviewer. This allows you to quickly secure approvals or inspect and document discrepancies—and then locate the necessary support documentation to close faster and more accurately. 

Detailed Look at the 9 Best Account Reconciliation Software & Tools

1. Vena 

Vena is a corporate performance management (CPM) suite developed to help finance, accounting and operations teams streamline their financial planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting processes, including financial close management, financial consolidation and account reconciliation. 

Vena’s central database eliminates the need to copy and paste entries by integrating and consolidating data from all your source systems into one place your entire team can access. 

And with workflow management, audit tracking, pre-configured templates, validation checklists, native API data integrations and reporting automation, you’ll develop faster, more transparent and more accurate close cycles that improve strategic decision making. 

Benefits 

• Familiar native Excel interface to reduce learning curve and increase adoption across your organization
• Integrates directly with your ERP and GL systems (to include your sub-ledger data, such as your Fixed Asset systems, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable)
• Pre-configured templates for standard reconciliations and specialized reconciliations such as prepaid expenses, fixed assets, bank and cash accounts and bad debt
• Secure segregation of duties through workflow process automation and automated audit trails 

Weaknesses 

• May not have a native connector to the GL/ERP your organization uses, but does, however, have a public API
• User interface could be more accessible (fonts and colors)
• Some additional training required to get up to speed with account reconciliation function

2. Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) 

Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM integrates and automates various financial management and account reconciliation processes such as payables, receivables, fixed assets, expenses and reporting to offer a comprehensive insight into the overall financial well-being of an organization. 

Benefits 

• Cloud-based solution that can be accessed anywhere from any browser
• Supports business process automation and can be configured to meet your business’s workflow processes
• “Out of the box” comes with standard business reporting and processing capabilities 

Weaknesses 

• Initial onboarding can be challenging and take a little longer than expected
• Reporting can be rigid as users may need to compile several different reports and integrate data to get the information needed
• Application load and processing times can be slow; prone to glitches 

3. BlackLine 

BlackLine is a cloud-based solution for financial reconciliation that automates and optimizes the account reconciliation process, along with financial close and financial consolidation. 

Benefits 

• Allows users to import data from various sources, such as ERP systems, spreadsheets or other financial applications to facilitate the reconciliation process
• Supports customizable approval workflows, ensuring that reconciliations are reviewed and authorized by the appropriate employee
• Keeps checklist and tasks related to monthly close on track  

Weaknesses 

• Implementation can be cost and resource intensive
• No ability to calculate variances as a percentage of a baseline
• No ability to normalize data or elect to have your data/periods "normalized" 

4. OneStream 

The OneStream platform supports financial planning, reporting and consolidation, offering a comprehensive suite of applications for financial consolidation and reconciliation, budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis.

Benefits  

• Reporting and analysis capabilities to monitor and analyze account balances, transactions and reconciliations
• Can integrate with other financial systems and data sources to streamline and automate the reconciliation process
• On-premise and cloud versions are at feature parity  

Weaknesses 

• Requires an Excel-add in to work within the Excel environment and can be tricky to learn
• Dashboard visuals aren’t up to par against other solutions such as Power BI
• Can require some very technical knowledge related to VB coding  

5. Planful 

Planful is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis software platform, designed to help organizations of all sizes streamline and optimize their financial planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting processes including financial close and consolidation processes. 

Benefits 

• Produces audit-ready balance sheet reconciliations
• Reviewers and managers have real-time and continuous visibility into the progress of reconciliations throughout the month-end process
• Users can substantiate reconciliations with documentation and comments, enabling in-product workflows  

Weaknesses 

• Account Reconciliation option must be turned on by a Planful Account Manager; Super Admins must change access permissions in order for other non-Admins to access Account Reconciliation
• Mapping of entities when setting up new items can be confusing and unclear
• Click-paths can be too long to complete simple tasks 

6. Trintech 

Trintech is a cloud-based financial close solution designed to help organizations and finance and accounting professionals automate the financial close process.  

Benefits 

• Match module auto matches all reconciliations
• Centralizes and automates reconciliation across all teams
• Helps reduce the number of reconciliations your team carries by grouping accounts  

Weaknesses 

• Users report having challenges with currency conversion when reconciling accounts
• Report creation is not straightforward; it can take time to customize the report to your requirements
• No connection to Power BI or similar tool 

7. FloQast 

FloQast is a software solution that focuses primarily on streamlining and improving financial reconciliation and close processes for organizations. 

Benefits 

• Facilitates automated reconciliation of accounts, helping to identify discrepancies and ensuring that financial data is accurate and consistent
• Reconciliation tracking provides a complete view of the reconciliation status of each account with balance comparisons, preparers, reviewers and sign-off dates
• Month-end checklists save you time by ensuring you don’t forget anything  

Weaknesses 

• Limited currency conversion in the Flux tool (does not have the capability to convert different currencies into USD)
• Cannot edit multiple entries at once
• Folder structure is set to follow calendar years which may not align with how your businesses internally refer to fiscal years 

8. Prophix 

Prophix is a software solution that specializes in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), helping organizations automate and streamline budgeting, forecasting, reporting and financial consolidation processes. 

Benefits 

• Can easily set up your company structure (legal entities, sectors) in the platform to make the consolidation process easy and automated
• Helps centralize global financial reporting and planning functions
• Knowledgeable customer-facing team with a background in accounting 

Weaknesses 

• Acquired Sigma Conso in 2021, a European company with expertise in financial close management, which is a separate solutiont not embedded in Prophix—as a result, there could be potential integration challenges between Sigma and Prophix
• Users are required to find creative ways to reduce processing time, which can lead to increased manual work required
• If you’re coming from an Excel environment, it can be difficult to translate something that you did in Excel to Prophix 

9. IBM Cognos Controller

IBM Cognos Controller is a cloud-based solution that enables finance teams to streamline their financial close, consolidation and reporting processes, ‌facilitating the creation of financial and management reports to help them ‌deliver accurate financial results. 

Benefits 

• Connects with ERP and finance ledger systems
• Automates data reconciliation, eliminations and currency translations
• Purpose-built for financial consolidations 

Weaknesses 

• Weak data input controls mean you could accidentally overwrite data without knowing it
• Challenges when dealing with multiple entities and various currencies create the possibility for errors in the data
• User interface can be overwhelming, cluttered and hard to navigate 

Simplify Your Account Reconciliation Process With Vena 

Making confident data-driven decisions and meeting reporting deadlines hinges on accurate reporting. 

Without an account reconciliation solution, your business risks making decisions based on outdated or inaccurate data, missing your reporting deadlines or not adhering to accounting standards as a result of trying to meet those deadlines. 

But with account reconciliation software, you can close your books much faster and produce data you know you can trust. 

After North Carolina-based retail developer Tanger Outlets implemented Vena for account reconciliation, they reduced their month-end close time by 50% and year-end close time by 33%. Through Vena, Tanger’s finance team can trigger notifications after each stage of the account reconciliation process, giving their auditors a view into who prepared and reviewed each checklist.  
 
By cutting down on time spent facilitating and auditing the account reconciliation process, the leading developer has been able to accelerate financial reporting, helping the company keep ahead of uncertain market conditions and outpace their competitors. 

As your business strives to close the books and make decisions faster, so are your competitors. For your organization to outpace them—or even just keep up—you need an account reconciliation process that helps you produce financial reporting in real time. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Account Reconciliation Software 

Why Use Account Reconciliation Software? 

Implementing account reconciliation software can improve the compliance, accuracy and efficiency of your account reconciliation and other financial close processes. 

Does My Company Need Account Reconciliation Software? 

If your finance team is reconciling your accounts manually, tediously retrieving supporting data from various systems and spreadsheets and coordinating inputs and approvals, you’re losing valuable time that could be better spent on analysis. You’re also more likely to encounter fraudulent or negligent accounting practices, poor internal controls and reporting discrepancies. 

By adopting an account reconciliation software, your company would benefit from a faster closing speed, more accurate data and better process transparency. 

How Can Account Reconciliation Software Help With Financial Reporting? 

Account reconciliation software helps you produce actuals more quickly, facilitating more accurate financial reporting.