The establishment of a global shared services center in Łódź, Poland, was a key part of Tate & Lyle’s consolidation efforts. From this central office, roughly 200 people in the finance department manage and reconcile balance sheets for thousands of general ledger accounts that cover transactions in the Americas as well as locations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. Prior to the Łódź office assuming responsibility for central finance operations, account reconciliations were regional; each office developed, maintained, and managed its own manual processes for reconciling accounts under its purview, including those for localized legal entities.

With the establishment of a central finance function, disparate account reconciliation processes would no longer be supported. The shared services and finance teams wanted to improve central oversight and efficiencies, increase visibility and tracking capabilities, and devote less time and resources to administrative tasks.

“Previously, our reconciliation processes were three-level and paper-based,” says Barbara Blaszczyk, head of finance operations at Tate & Lyle. “Manual reconciliations were recorded on spreadsheets, with paper signatures and different storage locations depending on the location of the account and team responsible. We wanted to have more control over the processes, and from an operational perspective, make cumbersome processes easier to manage.”

Increasing control over the reconciliation process would manifest itself in a number of different ways. It would result in more certainty over the precise number of fully reconciled accounts, improved documentation of follow-up action items, better transparency as a result of more consistent reconciliation processes, and less effort required to investigate reconciliation discrepancies.

According to Stephen Byers, group vice president and CIO at Tate & Lyle, the creation of the shared services group in parallel with the SAP systems consolidation project was the main driver for Tate & Lyle to make a business case for a solution to automate the account reconciliation process. “Centralizing financial activities into Łódź and establishing global common methods allowed us to streamline processes further with the use of automated reconciliations,” he says.

The search for an automated account reconciliation tool gained steam about one year after the shared services center in Łódź assumed responsibilities for the central finance function. According to Blaszczyk, the main requirements for an automation solution were that it must offer full integration with SAP and non-SAP accounting systems, reconciliation by category for grouped accounts, standardized templates, electronic approval workflows, the ability to handle multiple currency transactions, basic reporting, and an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.

After an exhaustive vendor evaluation and request for proposal (RFP) process that included live demos from multiple vendors, Tate & Lyle decided to purchase the Account Reconciliations and Task Management applications from SAP partner BlackLine and signed a contract late in 2013. “The solution was assessed as the most reliable in all the areas that we evaluated,” Blaszczyk says.

To optimize the use of the applications, Tate & Lyle performed the BlackLine implementation in parallel with a significant process simplification, knowing that automating account reconciliation would be far more effective with best-practice definitions in place.

According to Blaszczyk, the BlackLine project team’s first task was to create a responsibility matrix that listed account preparers and approvers for each account. The team also created a common chart of accounts where possible and categorized account modifications based on an account’s purpose. In addition, the team reviewed and updated accepted variances. All this was done in accordance with the Account Reconciliations product, which includes account templates, approval hierarchies, and auto-certification for static accounts.