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Reconciliation Control Framework™
The Reconciliation Control Framework™ is fundamental to the offerings of MetaGovernance. This framework incorporates the best practices from Information Governance, general Accounting principles, and disclosure controls. The marriage of these proven business techniques is used to assess the quality and risk factors inherent in a company’s end-user reporting solutions from spreadsheets to data warehouses. The Reconciliation Control Framework™ provides demonstrable evidence that the reporting engines of your organization are an accurate and auditable reflection of business processes. The Reconciliation Control Framework™ works within the context of your organization’s existing data retrieval and reporting applications. It becomes the backbone of any effective Information Governance initiative. Risk management compliance and controls and SOX 302 Certifications demand a level of confidence in the underlying data of the organization that can be achieved through the application of MetaGovernance’s Reconciliation Control Framework™.
The Reconciliation Control Framework™ is integral to any automated information reconciliation system. Confirming that an organization’s sub-ledgers and general ledgers agree is a manual reconciliation process that is repeated time and time again across the organization. Individual business units need to make certain that they are working with a complete set of books. As an example, a Risk Manager determining income forecasts, or other key financial measures by using a complication modeling tool needs to make certain that all the organization’s financial instruments are included in this model. They do this by reconciling the raw instrument data back to the General Ledger. That same reconciliation process is repeated by the Credit Risk Manager who needs to make certain that lendable value or needed collateral are calculated with a complete set of underlying data. So, once again, the operational transactions are verified against the General Ledger. It is common for MetaGovernance to see this process repeated over ten times on a daily basis. This is pure operational waste, and does nothing to verify that the data used for reporting matches either the General Ledger or the operational systems.
Reconciliation software, or complex reconciliation systems, often attempts to automate this process by developing an internal control framework. The problem with this approach is that it does not factor in the impact of reporting systems. The approach is also rarely incorporated with Information Governance process and procedures. When combined with effective Information Governance, the Reconciliation Control Framework™ solves this dilemma and provides the business fundamental confidence in the data across the organization is consistent and accurate.
Implementing a Reconciliation Control Framework™ begins with a basic dialogue about the overall business needs for data integrity and the existing processes and technology deployed at your organization to accomplish those needs. We continue the exploration to map out the various reconciliations currently being accomplished to provide an estimate of the operational savings available through the use of the control framework. MetaGovernance will also review the existing technical landscape to determine if your organization is best served by deploying a control framework with your technology or ours. MetaGovernance is tool agnostic. We care about providing working control solutions and not pushing a particular flavor of technology.
MetaGovernance takes this confidence one step further by providing clearly defined operational roles and procedures for addressing issues identified by the Reconciliation Control Framework™. These concepts are applicable to any industry including Healthcare, Manufacturing, Non-profit, Pharmaceutical, Finance and Banking.
Want to increase fundamental confidence in your data and stop wasting time with manual, redundant data reconciliations that do not address the bigger picture? Contact MetaGovernance to discuss the Reconciliation Control Framework™ and find out how.
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