Master your year-end close: Setting your business up for success in 2025

Transcript

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Andrea Boyle: Hi, everybody. Let me introduce myself. I'm Andrea Boyle, Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Zone & Co. Just a little bit about myself. I have 20 years of experience in technology and software and over 14 years in marketing and eight years in product marketing. Today with me, I have our host, Patrick Norton, our Solutions Principal.

Patrick, I'll let you go ahead and introduce yourself.

Patrick Norton: Yeah. Hi everybody. Patrick Norton here. As a Solution Principal at Zone, my job is to know all of our products at a technical level. Prior to this role I was a solution architect for a number of years, and I've been working in the NetSuite ecosystem for a little over 10 years.

Prior to that, my background was accounting. So looking forward to chatting more with you all.

Andrea Boyle: Thank you, Patrick. Well, we're. Today we're we have a jam packed session for you. You'll notice that our little chat functionality is disabled and the Q&A is enabled. So we encourage you throughout the presentation.

If you have questions, drop them in that Q&A. We have Anita standing by to answer questions and respond immediately. We're also going to take some time at the end and answer questions live if time permits. So just we encourage you to go ahead and use that Q&A.

For today's session, what we're going to do, our agenda, we're going to jump into who is Zone to give you a little bit of taste of who we are in case you don't know. We're going to jump into that live demo of ZoneReconcile, where Patrick is going to walk us through, you know, how you can be best set up for your year end close and process for reconciliations. Then I'm going to share some updates with you about a new functionality we're releasing called bank connectivity. It's going to be coming out in 2025. Again, we'll leave some time at the end for a Q&A, and then we will be sharing with you our end of the year checklist to help you get your close and close up your year end, close out the right way. All right.

So if you're new to Zone, welcome. We'd love to highlight some of our powerful solutions. And if you're already familiar with us, thank you for joining us again. Zone & Co is all about providing native NetSuite solutions designed to streamline finance operations. Everything from billing, payroll, approvals, reconciliation, and reporting. Our suite of products like ZoneCapture, ZoneApprovals, ZoneReconcile, and more empower your finance team. We have over 4,000 customers globally and over a decade of experience working with NetSuite in finance.

From here, I'm going to let Patrick go ahead and take it away.

Patrick Norton: Yeah. Thanks everybody. So I will pop over and start sharing my screen here. Thank you very much. And good news is we can reconcile on any cadence that we might want to.

And again, Patrick here, excited to demo ZoneReconcile for you. If this is your first time getting a glimpse into ZoneReconcile, definitely appreciate you taking a look. And what is it really quick: well, it's built 100% inside of NetSuite, so you don't have to set up any integrations. There's no external systems, with the exception of your bank.

And it was built to save time, reconciling bank transactions, of course. So instead of manually entering and matching bank transactions, it's going to automatically reconcile everything in NetSuite from invoices and credits, to payments and expense reports based on either an import or direct connection with the bank.

We have hundreds of customers all over the world using this. And it's going to help reduce time in the close process, reduce errors and frustration resulting from manual processes.

So, let's touch on some of the features and overall functionality we'll be looking at today. So, ZoneReconcile automates transaction entry. So, we import or source that bank statement file, perform an auto match functionality, and then, for example, money received can generate payment transactions against customer invoices. While vendors paid or linked to journal entries - those other expenses, ad hoc transactions, like your card payments, bank interest gains, can also really easily be created on the fly, but really all scenarios, transactions are supported.

There's a single source of truth, so combining transaction creation and reconciliation of that balance in one action leads to better control, better reporting, and eliminates errors. We can manage as many bank accounts as you need, so different formatted banks, currencies, no problem at all. And something I like to touch upon as well is we can manage credit cards and other payment providers too, so not just linked or just active on bank statements. We can reconcile things like Stripe, PayPal, that type of thing as well, credit cards, but all of these pieces are going to optimize that close process and take a lot of that headache out of things.

So I'm going to pop over into my NetSuite environment here. And if we use a direct connection with the bank, one of the ways we can see the new statements to process are our reminders. Otherwise, what I can do if I'm importing is I can pop in and import my statement. So I can import a single bank account, or I can import multiple bank accounts in a single file. But either way, whether direct connection or importing, what we'll ultimately end up in is our bank statement interface here.

And when we're importing CSV, BAI, BAI2, MT940, a bunch of country specific formats, we can really handle all those files. And here what we'll see is that statement. So all the header level information we'd expect to see, subsidiary, currency, transaction, to, from, balances, all that good stuff is at the header. Beneath we'll see those individual statement lines. So a bunch of out-of-the-box columns here. We can certainly add additional columns if you don't see pieces of data that you might want. We can do things like intercompany postings on the line here as well.

Now if I focus my attention to the rightmost column, we have matching reasons here. So is it going off transaction ID, is it going off other parameters, counterpart, so on and so forth. And on the left hand column we see select. And what this is telling us is that we're perfectly matched. No further action is required on our part as users. We're really managing by exception where there's no yes in select.

So, for example, in this first line for Academy Avenue Liquor Store here, what I'll look at is our description here. So I have my invoice number and our description, and that's the transaction in NetSuite that we're matched up to. Now because our select is yes, it indicates that the amount paid was the amount owed on the invoice.

If there was a partial payment, we would still have that matching reason on the right hand side. But select would be null, telling us that we needed to investigate the line. Now, something else interesting here, we're already fully matched on line three, but in this case, we have three different invoices matched to a single statement line.

Another example of this, maybe we created a payment batch through the electronic payments module. Oftentimes those banks are going to return the entire batch on one line of the statement, regardless of how many lines were in the batch. And we can tell the system to match on payment batch ID. So we would see a similar event where we have many NetSuite transactions to one statement line.

But in cases where we're not fully matched, like with Fabra Enterprises here, what I can do is I can click into our pop up and this is going to give us a list of suggested transactions. So in this case, I have my amount on the statement line and down below, I'll see, I have two invoices, just a day apart for the same amount .

Now, I could go and adjust my rules here and get a bit more accurate matching, but in this case, I can also just select the appropriate transaction and click submit. And now I'll see that select is yes here, and I can move on.

Now, I might have a miscellaneous line here without a lot of supporting information, and what I could do, I could investigate this line further, but I could also just pop in here and associate an account here, and what this will do is it will create a journal to account for this particular line.

Now, we might already have an account selected, like in the case for this Lyft line, where I have travel already selected, as well as a department. So how did this happen? Well, we have this concept called matching rules.

So I can pop this open, and I'll give you a look under the hood. So in this case, these are really easy to set up. We help you with these during the implementation process. And I'm giving this a unique name. It's active on both debits and credits. And if the description contains transportation, then we'll use the travel account and we'll set the department.

Now, if I look back at the line, we do indeed have transportation selected here, and that's why those selections have been maintained. So, this'll speed up the process even more, maintaining that accuracy and just making that close process a lot smoother. So, I'll pop in here and clear this out real quick.

Now on to my two favorite examples here. So, first, I'll click into the pop up for McKenzie Corporation. And in this case, I have a $1980 payment amount that corresponds to this amount, invoice, it's $2,000. So I could process and submit this now, leaving 20 unpaid, but more than likely, this is related to a wire fee, bank fee, whatever the case may be. So I'm actually able to select a payment difference reason, which will create a journal for the difference.

Now we can also create thresholds so I could have this automatically done if it fit within my threshold so I wouldn't even have to come in here and do this, again automating the process.

In the last line here, if I pop in, we could have a situation where an invoice is paid in a foreign currency from the bank statement. So I have a customer paying a Euro amount to my US bank account. We have an exchange rate in NetSuite that almost certainly wasn't the same exchange rate used by the bank. So when I click this, we're going to recalculate that exchange rate automatically.

Now, without ZoneReconcile, the user would have needed to manually calculate the exchange rate used by the bank, enter it into NetSuite, make sure that there was no rounding differences and the GL, GL impact for that customer payment. But in our case, we're processing it automatically. And, same thing, we can use thresholds for currency as well.

So I'll submit this. All of my lines now have a yes in the select column, but at any point I could have saved this and come back to it later. So if I start on a Friday, I need to run out of the office and come back on Monday, I can certainly do that. But since I'm all done, I'll click save.

And what this is doing is reconciling the bank statement. It's also creating the associated transactions that are necessary here. So once this is done, what I should see is I, well, I should not see any yellow banner indicating that I have some sort of discrepancy. I see my blue check. We're all set. And I'll see the, the lines beneath.

So I have my customer payments that were associated to these invoices. I'm actually pre paying a vendor in this case here. I have my check available to Lyft. For McKenzie Corporation, I have both my customer payment and that $20 journal entry. And then of course I have that miscellaneous journal entry as well.

So now I could move on to the next statement, but before I do that we do have some out of the box reporting involved here as well. So at any point I could pop into my reconciliation report. And I can select what I just did and I'll see a summary view of this. I can then drill in and see what we've reconciled, drill in even a step further. And I could export this at any point to distribute how I want.

And really that is just the day-to-day of a ZoneReconcile user. We access the bank statement page by direct feed or import, handle any exceptions with a few clicks of a button and process, which ultimately saves a ton of time on manual transaction creation and matching and streamlines that close process. So certainly not all the functionality, but it's a taste of what's available to you. So with that, I'll hand it back over to Andrea. And were there any questions right off the bat, Andrea?

Andrea Boyle: The only question I saw was how is this different than Match Bank Data on NetSuite?

Patrick Norton: So with Match Bank Data on NetSuite, the payment needs to be already created where that is not the case with ZoneReconcile. So that we're, we're able to actually create that payment with ZoneReconcile. So again, just streamlining and automating the process.

Andrea Boyle: Awesome. And we have one more. How are credentials for the bank feed managed and does this handle 2FA for bank auth.

Patrick Norton: While Anita responds, I have a couple other questions received. When we are paying a vendor and account is selected, is just a journal entry created? And the answer there is we have flexibility over most things in ZoneReconcile, so if we want, rather than a journal, we can create a check.

So, if we look back at Lyft, instead of a journal entry, we have the option to create a check. Could have just as easily had a journal entry created here. The other question I received was, are we limited to one intercompany account? So if we want to just push this to one other intercompany or one other subsidiary and we can actually create multi-line journals.

So if we need to allocate something to multiple different departments, maybe it's a utility bill. Or if we need to allocate TNM across subsidiary, we can split out multiple lines here.

Andrea Boyle: Thank you so much, Patrick. That is awesome. This has been awesome. It's been a lot of information to digest. So we really do appreciate this demo.

I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and hopefully everybody can see it. We are on the track to implementing a new functionality in Q1 of 2025 called Bank Connectivity. So what is Bank Connectivity? It's going to streamline your financial close process by automatically syncing bank transactions directly into NetSuite, ensuring your data's always up to date and aligned with your bank statements- automating bank statement retrieval and reconciliation, eliminating those manual processes, reducing errors, and significantly lowering operational costs.

With it, you'll be able to gain insights into your cash flow, your direct bank connection, empowering your finance team to make more proactive data driven decisions.

This is designed to integrate seamlessly with ZoneReconcile. So everything Patrick showed you, this will come with that as well. It's an add on and it's very straightforward implementation. It doesn't require extensive NetSuite expertise, so it's really something that becomes accessible to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Thank you for attending. Patrick, thank you so much for all the valuable information that you shared on ZoneReconcile, and everybody, if we don't see you, have an amazing end of year, and we'll see you in 2025.