http://www.woodswhelan.com/
Good afternoon blog world and my accounting friends,
Having been a Chartered Accountant for ten years in both public practice and Industry I frequently came across a problem which surprisingly had no technological solution. The problem was that i spent many frustrating days and sometimes weeks, late nights and many coffees trying to reconcile, or as we call it our business "ticking and basing" our clients paper bank statements. Like myself in the beginning, many book keepers and accountants have experience of trying to scan documents into spreadsheet. But once they get that far the time taken to process the data and reconcile the statements takes as long if not longer than the "ticking and bashing".
It was through doing these kinds long laborious jobs that I began researching OCR (optical character recognition). After some research I teamed up with my colleague Brendan Woods, a programmer, and we designed a simple, robust solution for this frustrating task.
In October of 2009 we released our product AutoRec which combines with Omnipage form Nuance to solve the problem of manual paper bank statements reconciliation. Customers of ours are doing Bank Recs and subsequent analysis, we calculate at 50 to 85% faster than the manual approach, depending on the size of the batch of statements handed into the practice/bureau.
It is a three step process of simply SCAN - PROCESS - ANALYSE
SCAN - Scan Bank Statements in order, earliest first (ensure running balance ties in in consecutive pages)
PROCESS - The layout of AutoRec means the user can interact with the resultant OCR breakdown and correct where a "non-numeric" has occurred, for example a heavy crease on the page
ANALYSE - Once the running balance has been verified and achieved, AutoRec quickly sorts cheques, debits and credits analysed by description. AutoRec can also produce a file that is uploadable to accounting packages if reconciliation needs to take place against accounting modules.
The output is an excel worksheet with different sheets for direct debits (and transfers), Cheques and Lodgements, outstanding Cheques
If your accounting package allows automatic upload in CSV format then even better, these various worksheets are easily uploadable as CSVs.
We are confident our product is the solution to what many of you have been searching for for years. Please visit our website http://www.woodswhelan.com/ to see a demonstration video and some customer testimonials.
As we move towards a more paperless office and practice, AutoRec is the solution for converting and reconciling your clients bank statements to the more efficient and functional soft format.
I look forward to many more helpful blogs in the future
Robert Whelan
http://www.woodswhelan.com/
Managing Director
Woods Whelan ltd
