How accounting firm Trivium cut month-end close time by 50% using Mercury and Puzzle
Lisa Kleinsorge
Trivium wanted to deliver a best-in-class product for their clients, which means delivering financials faster without sacrificing accuracy. The starting point of any month's close process is the bank or cash reconciliation process, which also happens to be one of the most time-consuming and anxiety-inducing parts of the close process.
“Did my client’s bank feed go down, so I will be missing transactions when I log in?”
“If the cash doesn’t reconcile, how much time (and emails with the CEO) will it take to resolve?”
“Will the client be upset that I have to bill more hours due to challenges with technology?”
Trivium streamlined their client’s accounting workflows, reduced time and confidence in the month close, and improved accounting efficiencies by utilizing the combination of Mercury's API solutions and Puzzle's modern General Ledger.
Trivium’s accounting team decided to test the combination of Mercury’s Transactions and Bank Statements APIs and Puzzle’s modern General Ledger on one of their high-profile startup clients. During the month-end process, the Trivium team had two processes that were particularly time-consuming for this client.
First, do the bank/cash reconciliation to ensure that all cash transactions are recorded in the accounting system. When this doesn’t happen, there is a series of emails and calls back and forth with clients to get statements, manually compare between systems, open multiple tabs, and manually spot-check back and forth.
Leveraging the Mercury-Puzzle integration, Trivium gained access to a transaction feed with running balances along with the statement opening and closing balances, a feature not available in many other banking platform. Reliability issues plague bank feeds, and addressing this is an important part of Mercury's API strategy; to that end, integrating with Mercury’s APIs reduced disconnection frequency by 50% compared to incumbents.
The Mercury-Puzzle integration provided confidence that the bank reconciliation was complete, and automatically generated with a single integration. But more than just calculating that the balances and general ledger match, Puzzle drafts the bank reconciliation for the company’s records. It summarizes any differences and preselects included transactions, allowing the bookkeeper to confidently review and validate the results with a single click of “complete." It also records results in the audit log and month-close checklist.
With the power of Mercury's APIs, 100% of all bank reconciliations are prepared for review, and 81% are perfectly automated with no human interaction needed, saving Trivium’s accountants a substantial amount of time. The bank reconciliation process now takes around 5 minutes, which can take up to two hours otherwise. Using the Mercury transactions and accounts APIs, Puzzle was able to handle the complexities of Bank and Credit Card reconciliations seamlessly, leaving us with more time to concentrate on other crucial tasks.
“Puzzle’s integration with Mercury’s APIs overall has significantly streamlined our approach to month-end close”, says Sharad Singh, CEO of Trivium.
Second, validating the accuracy of the financials. Mercury’s APIs provide additional capabilities, beyond a traditional transaction feed:
Tackling the challenge of understanding and categorizing transactions with limited data requires bookkeepers to reach out to their clients to gather additional information, requiring additional time and delaying the close.
Mercury's transactions and statements APIs helped enable detailed metadata including descriptions, memos, and notes to flow seamlessly into Puzzle. Now, Trivium’s accountants could access comprehensive context for each stand-alone transaction just by looking at the transaction.
This was a complete game-changer. Mercury’s APIs eliminated the need for time-consuming investigations and communication with Trivium’s clients, as they had all the details directly in the accounting system.
“The bank, credit card, and Mercury integrations in Puzzle saved time and days by removing the need to ask the client to review categorizations, help us understand what was missing, and then make those corrections in the accounting software. It can take several days to get the requested information from clients, otherwise. This made the month-end process much quicker and easier,” shares the accounting team at Trivium.
By taking advantage of the Mercury-Puzzle integration, Trivium’s accounting clients reaped the rewards of a faster month-end close. The timely reporting facilitated more agile decision-making, helping clients gain deeper insights into their operations, cash, burn, and runway trends.
As Trivium and its clients continue to embrace the power of Mercury and Puzzle’s solutions, they hope to achieve even greater efficiencies.
Learn about Mercury’s APIs here.
Learn about how Puzzle and Mercury automate accounting here.
Learn about Trivium here.
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