If your firm works with a lot of family groups and multi-entity structures, you’ll know the pattern: distributions, dividends, loans, rent – all moving between related parties, often several times over in the one group. A large part of preparing workpapers for those clients isn’t just getting the balances to agree once. It’s making sure they continue to agree right up until you certify and complete the workpaper, and send out the final financials.

We’ve seen this firsthand from our own accounting backgrounds – a figure that did agree can suddenly not agree, because of something as simple as a missing loan transaction. And because related entities are connected, that one change can trickle through the rest of the group, throwing out balances in entities that had nothing to do with the original transaction. That’s why we built our Inter-Entity Reconciliation (IER) feature.

If any of the three points below sound familiar, we think you’ll like what it does.

1. You have a lot of related parties

If your client groups regularly run two or more entities – an operating company, an investment trust, profits and transactions flowing between them – you already know the drill. Reconciling related-party lines and making sure every figure agrees before financials go out isn’t a one-off task. It’s something you’re doing for every one of those clients, every time.

2. You’re manually checking balances across multiple tabs

Maybe it’s a final draft of the financial statements open in one tab, your current workpapers in another, and an incognito tab open so you can have multiple accounting ledgers open at the one time. If you’re piecing related-party loans together this way, that’s exactly the workflow IER is built to replace.

3. You want peace of mind built into the workpaper, live

IER sits directly inside your Cimplico Workpapers file. You map the related-party accounts that should agree, and from there it’s checked automatically: if the balances reconcile and the rest of the criteria are met, you’ll see that. If a balance falls out of sync – even after you’ve already reviewed it, because the file’s been updated since – you’ll be flagged. As long as you’re refreshing your trial balance, that check runs right up until certification and completion, all on the one screen.

 

See it in 45 minutes on Tuesday, 1 September

We’re running a webinar on Inter-Entity Reconciliations at 3:30pm AEST, Tuesday 1 September. If you’re free, you can register here → Register for the webinar.