How do you decide upon the best approach to clear your check register in SAP for your company? Let me help to demystify this question and others over the next three weeks of edublogs. Stay tuned to find out that keeping the check register up to date doesn’t need to be a difficult exercise. I'll provide three different options on how you can do this within your company. But how do you decide which option makes the most sense for you? Here are some considerations:
- Volume and Timing: How many checks are being issued being issued from this account each month? Is receiving an encashment file once per month sufficient? At what point would potential error corrections be too large? Does the volume become too large by having a file only once a month to manage errors? Perhaps it is easier to receive activity each day for reconciliation purposes.
- Cost: Do you have to pay additional to have the individual checks included on your bank statement file? What is the additional charge? Could you use the bank statement and eliminate the need to have a separate interface for only cashed checks?
- Monitoring: Who will perform the ongoing monitoring to ensure checks are being updated in the register? Will this be done as part of your bank reconciliation process, by your team supporting payments, or someone else? Who will make sure that either solution continues to work properly? Will this person participate in regression testing for the solution once it is live?
- Knowledge and Know-how: Does your technical team understand how to set up the different solutions? Do they understand the potential failure points? What will be your processes for ongoing monitoring?
- Staffing availability: Does your internal project team have the capacity to set up these interfaces? Often project teams have competing priorities with everything demanding top position in the project scope. If there is a constraint on internal staffing from either the business function or IT, perhaps it is best to update checks manually while other priorities are completed.
- Cost of compliance: In cases where the processes are completely manual, what is it costing you to comply with the various state escheatment laws? Would an automated interface make your compliance efforts easier and less expensive?
Next week, I'll talk about one of the options in SAP for how to keep the check register up to date.
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