It takes you 14 days to close each month because you are using hundreds of spreadsheets to reconcile your financials.

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A financial services company had 27,000 cost centers in their chart of accounts. Reconciliation from their subledgers was a nightmare because the users didn’t have consistent posting processes. Values in that cost center included project values, department values, location values, and product line values. They had to break up every transaction to reflect the different segments that they wanted to track. For example if a transaction was for $1000 credit and was a project in New York for a security product, they created 3 credit accounting entries to each of the three cost centers representing the project number cost center, the cost center for New York, and the cost center for the security product. Of course, they created 3 or more debit entries for the offsetting entries. Anyone was allowed to create new cost centers for any reason. The cost centers were not in any logical ranges so creating reports was hard, budgeting was hard, and the maintenance on any accounting reclassifications was overwhelming.

They used FlexField software to map many of their cost centers to one new cost center value. They also created a separate segment for locations, and a separate segment for product lines. They reduced the number of cost centers to approximately 1100 and reduced their close cycle to 2 days.