The Secret to Shortening your Financial Close Cycle

Month after month, year after year, financial close management is a dreary fact of life for real estate accounting staff. While it’s absolutely essential, there is little that’s creative or enjoyable about it. Most companies still handle month-end and year-end closes using Microsoft Excel: 33-year-old software that remains useful, but for this particular task entails hours of copying and pasting trial balance data from the accounting system into spreadsheet tabs, reconciling the subsidiary ledgers to the trial balance and attaching supporting documentation. Real estate accountants report that it can take anywhere from two to four hours to close each property. Which means that for a modest portfolio of 10 properties, you’re looking at 20 to 40 hours of drudgery every month. But as Accounting Today reports, “Old habits, including business processes, die hard — and for many organizations, the monthly close is the perfect example. While other accounting functions have applied technology to streamline and automate recurring tasks, the monthly close process has remained mired in inefficiencies.” True, you can already implement third-party software that helps automate close management. But unless it’s integrated with your accounting software, it’s a half-measure at best. Saving time through automation Starting this month, RealPage Financial Close Management will automate the creation of month-end and year-end work papers. And by automate, we mean you click a button and the workpapers are done. There’s no error-prone, manual back and forth between the accounting system and sub-ledgers: the data is integrated with RealPage accounting, placed in the appropriate sub-ledgers and reconciled to the trial balance. All supporting documents are attached to the appropriate sub-ledger. And there’s more: Workflow management will be incorporated as well. This means the software will track and document the flow from...