7 Balance Sheet Reconciliation Challenges in SAP (And How to Solve Them)

Let’s explore the seven most common balance sheet reconciliation challenges in SAP environments and how modern solutions like BEST’s Balance Sheet Recons module are solving them.

1. Manual Data Extraction and Excel Dependency

The challenge: Standard SAP lacks a built-in reconciliation process, forcing finance teams to extract data to Excel for reconciliation. This creates version control issues, formula errors, and significant manual effort.

The solution: BEST’s Balance Sheet Recons module operates entirely within SAP, eliminating the need to extract data to external spreadsheets. Teams can prepare, review, and approve reconciliations directly in the familiar SAP environment.

2. Poor Visibility into Reconciliation Status

The challenge: In traditional SAP setups, there’s no centralised dashboard showing reconciliation completion status across the organisation. Finance leaders struggle to monitor progress during critical month-end periods.

The solution: Real-time visibility dashboards provide immediate insights into reconciliation progress across all entities and account types. BEST’s reporting functionality allows finance leaders to quickly identify bottlenecks and address them before they impact closing deadlines.

3. Inconsistent Reconciliation Documentation

The challenge: Without a standardised approach, reconciliation documentation varies widely across teams and accountants. This creates audit challenges and makes knowledge transfer difficult when staff changes occur.

The solution: Standardised, system-guided reconciliation templates ensure consistency across all balance sheet accounts. BEST’s solution embeds best practices directly into the workflow, ensuring all reconciliations meet documentation standards.

4. Inefficient Approval Workflows

The challenge: Manual reconciliation processes often involve cumbersome approval workflows using email or physical document routing. This leads to approval bottlenecks and delays.

The solution: Automated approval workflows route reconciliations to appropriate reviewers based on predefined rules. BEST leverages SAP’s workflow capabilities to streamline approvals while maintaining proper segregation of duties.

5. Difficulty Identifying High-Risk Accounts

The challenge: With limited resources, finance teams struggle to focus attention on accounts that present the greatest risk, often applying the same level of scrutiny to all accounts.

The solution: By applying a risk rating to reconciliations, and integrating this into the Automated Approval process, BEST helps to ensure that high risk accounts are reconciled accordingly, whilst also being able to automatically approve low risk accounts. 

6. Limited Audit Trails

The challenge: Standard SAP implementations provide limited audit trails for reconciliation activities, creating compliance challenges and making historical investigations difficult.

The solution: Comprehensive audit trails capture all reconciliation activities, including who prepared, reviewed, and approved each reconciliation. BEST’s detailed logging ensures organisations can easily demonstrate compliance during audits.

7. Resource-Intensive Low-Value Reconciliations

The challenge: Finance teams waste valuable time reconciling accounts with minimal risk or activity, diverting resources from more critical financial activities.

The solution: Auto-reconciliation capabilities identify and clear accounts meeting predefined criteria. BEST customers report that up to 76% of reconciliations can be auto-approved, as demonstrated by Clinix’s recent implementation.

Transform Your Balance Sheet Reconciliation Process Today

By addressing these common SAP reconciliation challenges with purpose-built solutions like BEST’s Balance Sheet Recons module, finance teams can dramatically improve efficiency while strengthening controls. The results speak for themselves: faster month-end closings, increased accountability, improved accuracy, and finance teams focused on analysis rather than manual matching.

The most successful implementations, like Clinix’s recent project, deliver immediate results with the right SAP-integrated technology, transforming balance sheet reconciliation from a mundane obligation to a strategic advantage.