Bord na Móna saves time with automated account reconciliations on Oracle Cloud

Based in Ireland, Bord na Móna is a climate solutions provider that offers renewable energy, recycling, waste management, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity conservation.

Due to the company’s large size and complexity, conducting accounting and transactional tasks was challenging for the finance team. Financial analysts had to extract and upload data from disparate sources across the company, then manually match transactions and reconcile accounts before creating reports. This process was resource-consuming and cumbersome as the team repeated it for 3,000 accounts every month.

Bord na Móna wanted to replace its home-grown manual reconciliation system and enjoy greater internal operational efficiencies. The company’s finance and IT teams decided to adopt a comprehensive cloud-based EPM solution that would improve efficiencies through automation and leveraging legacy data. In return, this would also improve compliance and reduce costs.

Moreover, the organization was also committed to reducing its carbon footprint by migrating its entire infrastructure to an eco-friendly technology vendor. The EPM application had to run in an energy-efficient cloud data center.

The company was familiar with Oracle’s technical excellence, premium support, and capabilities of Oracle Cloud Applications. Bord na Móna selected Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Oracle Cloud EPM Account Reconciliation to complement its existing applications portfolio with flexible workflow configuration options and unlimited data sources.

Oracle Cloud EPM Account Reconciliation enables organizations to close faster by automating account reconciliations and transaction matching. Through the automation of this labor-intensive process, the system is also able to improve the accuracy of financial statements and increase compliance. Additionally, it is a fully integrated Oracle Cloud EPM system, facilitating a complete end-to-end financial close.

Bord na Móna considered several potential vendors but decided Oracle Cloud was the best solution, given Oracle’s commitment to providing a 100% renewable energy-powered architecture, which aligns with Bord na Móna’s own green energy commitments.

Using the automation functions of Oracle Cloud EPM Account Reconciliation, Bord na Móna created rules that auto-closed accounts based on custom conditions, facilitating 57% of its 3,000 reconciliations to auto-close in a period. As a result of the newfound automation in its reconciliation process, the company has been able to reap significant resource gains and cost savings.

After incorporating advanced matching rules through Oracle EPM Account Reconciliation’s user interface, the company created unique keys and additional logic to achieve auto-matching rates as high as 90%. This reduced the time required to complete the transaction matching process, saving 50% manual effort in most cases.

The company also gained governance and process quality management with comprehensive reporting features and an unlimited number of customizable attributes, further enhancing the quality and management of financial data.  Additionally, the system provides Bord na Móna with a full audit trail of each stage.

Oracle Consulting supported Bord na Móna in developing an account reconciliation solution that drilled down to the company’s Oracle E-Business Suite system, providing a comprehensive account reconciliation and transaction matching solution. Teaming with Oracle Consulting, Bord na Móna configured advanced match and reconciliation rules to enhance the user experience and improve automation capabilities.