> Continuous Process Improvement > Record to Report Period Close & Reconciliation > Workiva

Improve Your Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation

Your 6-step guide to optimize Workiva Record to Report.
Download Data Template
Improve Your Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation
Challenges (12) Goals (11) 6 Steps Preview Outcomes Data FAQs (5)

Optimize Workiva Record to Report for Faster Period Close

Process inefficiencies can hinder your financial reporting cycle, leading to delays and accuracy challenges. Our platform helps you pinpoint bottlenecks across your operations. Easily identify areas where reconciliation processes can be streamlined and accelerate your period close for greater efficiency and compliance.

Download our pre-configured data template and address common challenges to reach your efficiency goals. Follow our six-step improvement plan and consult the Data Template Guide to transform your operations.

Show detailed description

Why Optimize Your Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation?

The Record to Report, R2R, Period Close and Reconciliation process is a cornerstone of financial operations, directly impacting an organization's ability to generate accurate, timely financial statements. While platforms like Workiva significantly streamline various aspects of financial reporting and compliance, the underlying process can still harbor inefficiencies, manual dependencies, and hidden bottlenecks. Delays in closing periods or inaccuracies in reconciliations not only strain finance teams but can also lead to missed reporting deadlines, compliance risks, and a lack of confidence in financial data. The cost of an inefficient R2R cycle extends beyond labor, affecting strategic decision-making and investor relations.

Optimizing your Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation is not merely about speeding things up, it is about enhancing the reliability and integrity of your financial reporting. It involves understanding the true flow of activities from the initiation of a period close to its final completion, including all steps related to data collection, transaction posting, accruals, intercompany reconciliations, balance sheet and profit & loss account reconciliations, adjustments, and final approvals. By gaining deep insights into these intricate sequences, you can identify precisely where the process falters and implement targeted improvements that yield significant benefits.

How Process Mining Transforms Workiva R2R Operations

Process mining offers a powerful, data-driven approach to dissecting and understanding the actual execution of your Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation process within Workiva. Instead of relying on anecdotal evidence or static process maps, process mining uses event logs from your Workiva environment and integrated systems to reconstruct the complete journey of each financial period's close. This end-to-end view provides unparalleled visibility into the entire lifecycle, from the moment the period close is initiated until financial statements are approved and the period is completed.

By tracking activities for each financial period, which serves as your case identifier, process mining can pinpoint specific areas of delay. It allows you to analyze actual cycle times for critical activities like 'Balance Sheet Account Reconciliation Started' or 'Reconciliation Reviewed & Approved'. You can discover how often certain activities are repeated, indicating rework, or identify deviations from your standardized process. For instance, you might uncover that 'Adjusting Journal Entries Posted' frequently occurs after 'Financial Statements Generated', suggesting a need for earlier intervention. This capability is crucial for identifying bottlenecks in reconciliation and adjustment processes, which often impede a swift close, and for ensuring all steps comply with established financial reporting standards.

Key Improvement Areas Identified Through Process Mining

Applying process mining to your Workiva-driven Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation process highlights several key areas ripe for improvement:

  • Accelerating Reconciliation: Identify accounts, reconciliation categories, or specific departments experiencing the longest reconciliation cycles. Uncover root causes for delays, such as missing source data, multiple review iterations, or late submission of supporting documents. This insight allows you to streamline these critical steps, reducing the overall period close cycle time.
  • Optimizing Adjusting Journal Entries: Analyze the timing, frequency, and nature of adjusting journal entries. Process mining can reveal if adjustments are being made too late in the cycle, causing rework, or if specific types of adjustments are consistently problematic. This enables proactive management and potentially earlier intervention.
  • Streamlining Review and Approval Cycles: Pinpoint bottlenecks in the review and approval stages for reconciliations and financial statements. Understand why certain reviews take longer or involve more stakeholders than necessary, allowing you to optimize workflows and reduce approval cycle times.
  • Enhancing Compliance and Audit Readiness: By visualizing the actual process flow, you can verify adherence to internal controls and regulatory requirements. Identify instances where activities are skipped or performed out of sequence, flagging potential compliance risks and strengthening your audit trail.

Expected Outcomes and Measurable Benefits

By leveraging process mining to optimize your Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation in Workiva, you can expect a range of tangible benefits:

  • Reduced Financial Close Cycle Time: Significantly shorten the time required to complete each financial close, accelerating financial statement generation and improving responsiveness.
  • Enhanced Accuracy and Reliability: Minimize errors and the need for post-close adjustments by identifying and addressing root causes of inaccuracies earlier in the process, leading to more reliable financial reports.
  • Improved Resource Allocation: Gain a clear understanding of where resources are being consumed inefficiently, allowing for better allocation of personnel and optimization of workload across departments.
  • Strengthened Compliance: Ensure consistent adherence to internal policies and external regulations, reducing compliance risk and providing stronger audit defenses.
  • Greater Visibility and Control: Achieve unparalleled transparency into your entire Record to Report process, enabling proactive management and continuous process improvement efforts.

Getting Started with Record to Report Period Close Optimization

Embrace a data-driven approach to transform your Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation process. By analyzing the complete flow of activities within Workiva, you can identify hidden inefficiencies, eliminate bottlenecks, and significantly improve your financial reporting cycle time and accuracy. Begin your journey toward a more efficient, compliant, and transparent financial close today.

Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation Period Close Optimization Financial Reporting Compliance Account Reconciliation Financial Cycle Management R2R Process Improvement Controller Finance Department Closing Process Efficiency

Common Problems & Challenges

Identify which challenges are impacting you

Delays in completing the period close process directly impact timely financial reporting and decision-making. Extended cycles lead to missed deadlines and a rushed review process, increasing the risk of errors and needing more resources.
ProcessMind analyzes the end-to-end Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation process, identifying specific activities or stages causing bottlenecks. It reveals the root causes of delays in Workiva, allowing for targeted optimization and faster closes.

Inefficient reconciliation, especially for complex accounts or intercompany transactions, significantly slows down the Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation process. These bottlenecks can delay the preparation of trial balances and financial statements, impacting reporting accuracy and timeliness.
ProcessMind precisely maps the reconciliation workflows within Workiva, identifying specific accounts, categories, or users that consistently cause delays. This enables streamlined reconciliation approval and more efficient closing.

Adjusting journal entries posted late in the financial close cycle can disrupt the process, requiring re-work and increasing the risk of inaccuracies in financial statements. This leads to inefficient resource allocation and potential compliance issues.
ProcessMind tracks the timing and volume of adjusting journal entries within Workiva's Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation, revealing patterns of late adjustments and their preceding activities. This helps proactively address underlying issues that cause rework.

When the Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation process deviates from standard operating procedures without proper authorization, it introduces inconsistencies, compliance risks, and potential errors. This lack of control makes it difficult to ensure standardized financial reporting.
ProcessMind provides a visual map of all actual process paths taken in Workiva, highlighting deviations from the ideal flow and identifying where and why unauthorized variations occur, ensuring greater control and compliance.

Complex intercompany transactions often lead to prolonged reconciliation efforts, especially across different entities or systems feeding into Workiva. These inefficiencies cause significant delays in the Period Close & Reconciliation process and can result in unresolved discrepancies.
ProcessMind analyzes the complete intercompany reconciliation workflow, identifying specific entities, transaction types, or approval steps that create friction and delay. This improves global reporting accuracy and speed.

During the Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation, certain team members or departments may experience disproportionate workloads, leading to burnout, errors, and delays. This uneven distribution prevents efficient resource utilization and impacts overall close efficiency within Workiva.
ProcessMind visualizes resource allocation across all close activities, identifying overloaded individuals or teams and revealing opportunities to balance tasks and optimize staffing during critical periods to prevent burnout.

Delays in reviewing and approving reconciliations, trial balances, or financial statements extend the overall Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation timeframe. Slow approvals can be caused by bottlenecks at specific review stages or by a lack of clear ownership, impacting timely sign-off in Workiva.
ProcessMind tracks the duration and handovers for each review and approval activity, highlighting specific stages or approvers that cause delays. This enables faster financial statement finalization and reduces cycle times.

Issues with the quality or completeness of source data collected before or during the Period Close & Reconciliation in Workiva can lead to significant re-work, manual adjustments, and prolonged reconciliation efforts. This impacts the accuracy of financial reports and requires additional time to resolve discrepancies.
ProcessMind can identify where and when data quality issues manifest in the process, showing which reconciliation activities are most affected and the upstream causes of data inconsistencies, reducing manual effort.

Reliance on manual workarounds to complete activities within the Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation process, particularly when using Workiva, introduces inconsistencies, audit vulnerabilities, and higher risks of non-compliance with financial regulations. These unstandardized steps lack traceability.
ProcessMind automatically detects and quantifies the frequency of manual interventions or unapproved ad-hoc activities, exposing hidden compliance risks and opportunities to automate or standardize for better governance.

The final steps of preparing and generating financial statements can be surprisingly inefficient, especially if previous reconciliation or adjustment steps were delayed or inaccurate. This directly impacts the ability to meet external reporting deadlines and provide timely insights.
ProcessMind analyzes the entire sequence leading up to financial statement generation in Workiva, identifying precursor activities that consistently delay this critical final output, streamlining the entire Period Close & Reconciliation process.

A consistently high number of adjusting journal entries after initial reconciliations indicates underlying issues with data accuracy, process execution, or initial transaction posting. This inflates the effort and time required for the Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation, leading to potential errors.
ProcessMind quantifies the volume and timing of adjustments in Workiva, linking them back to specific reconciliation categories or source data issues, allowing for proactive correction of root causes and improved efficiency.

When different company codes or departments follow varied procedures for the Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation, it leads to inefficiencies, difficulties in consolidation, and increased compliance risks. This lack of standardization makes it hard to scale best practices.
ProcessMind compares close processes across various company codes and departments within Workiva, identifying where and how processes diverge. This enables the enforcement of best practices and standardization for a more efficient and compliant close.

Typical Goals

Define what success looks like

This goal aims to significantly reduce the total time required to complete all Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation activities within Workiva. Achieving a faster close cycle enables earlier financial reporting, improves business agility, and reduces the strain on finance teams, allowing more time for strategic analysis rather than operational crunch.ProcessMind identifies the exact activities and bottlenecks causing delays in the financial period close. By visualizing the true process flow and cycle times for each step, ProcessMind helps pinpoint where idle times occur, where work queues build up, and where resources are stretched, enabling targeted improvements to cut weeks or days off the closing calendar.

Streamlining the reconciliation workflow means optimizing the sequence and execution of tasks involved in reconciling accounts during the Record to Report - Period Close. This reduces delays and rework, ensuring that balance sheet and profit & loss accounts are reconciled efficiently and accurately within Workiva, which is critical for timely financial statement generation.ProcessMind provides a detailed view of all reconciliation activities, revealing actual paths taken, deviations from the standard, and choke points. It quantifies the impact of manual steps and handoffs, allowing organizations to redesign workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and eliminate unnecessary steps to achieve significant efficiency gains in reconciliation.

This goal focuses on decreasing the number and volume of adjusting journal entries made after initial reconciliations are completed, particularly within Workiva. A high volume of late adjustments indicates potential issues earlier in the process, impacting reporting accuracy and requiring additional resources, leading to rework and potential compliance risks.ProcessMind helps identify the root causes of frequent adjustments by tracing back from the "Adjusting Journal Entries Posted" activity to preceding steps. It reveals patterns, common errors, and specific GL accounts or departments that consistently trigger adjustments, enabling proactive measures to fix data quality issues or process gaps before they escalate.

Achieving firm-wide standardization ensures that all entities follow a consistent and approved Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation process within Workiva. This reduces errors, enhances compliance, simplifies audits, and creates a predictable closing environment, fostering greater efficiency and comparability across the organization.ProcessMind automatically discovers all actual process variations, highlighting deviations from the ideal or intended close process. It visualizes which entities or departments diverge most and quantifies the impact of these variations on cycle time and cost, providing the evidence needed to enforce best practices and achieve true process harmonization.

This goal aims to enhance the speed and accuracy of intercompany reconciliation processes within the Record to Report cycle, especially when handled through Workiva. Efficient intercompany reconciliation is crucial for consolidated financial statements, preventing delays, reducing discrepancies, and ensuring compliance with global accounting standards.ProcessMind maps the intricate paths of intercompany reconciliation, identifying loops, manual interventions, and delays that hinder efficiency. By analyzing the flow of "Intercompany Reconciliation Performed" activities, it can pinpoint specific matching issues, data inconsistencies, or communication breakdowns between entities, allowing for targeted improvements to accelerate this complex part of the close.

Balancing the workload ensures that tasks and responsibilities during the Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation process are distributed equitably among team members using Workiva. This prevents burnout, improves employee morale, and ensures that critical activities are not delayed due to resource bottlenecks or over-reliance on specific individuals.ProcessMind analyzes activity ownership and resource allocation across the entire close process. It identifies users or departments that are consistently overloaded or idle during specific phases, revealing uneven distribution patterns. This insight enables managers to reallocate tasks, cross-train staff, or optimize handoffs to create a more efficient and sustainable closing environment.

This goal seeks to shorten the duration of review and approval activities for reconciliations and financial statements within Workiva's Record to Report process. Faster approvals accelerate the overall close, improve responsiveness, and minimize the risk of late-stage delays that can impact reporting deadlines and business decisions.ProcessMind visualizes the complete "Reconciliation Reviewed & Approved", "Financial Statements Reviewed", and "Financial Statements Approved" activities, highlighting precisely where delays occur in the approval chain. It can identify bottlenecks caused by specific approvers, missing information, or complex approval hierarchies, providing data-driven insights to streamline the entire review lifecycle.

Enhancing source data consistency means ensuring that financial data collected for the Record to Report - Period Close is uniform, accurate, and complete across all systems feeding into Workiva. Inconsistent data leads to reconciliation issues, errors, and significant rework, prolonging the close cycle and compromising report reliability.ProcessMind, by analyzing activities like "Source Data Collected" and "Transactions Posted", can help identify specific data sources or types that frequently lead to discrepancies or require manual adjustments. While not directly cleaning data, it pinpoints where data quality issues manifest in the process, allowing for upstream corrections to data input, integration, or system configurations.

The goal is to remove unapproved manual workarounds and deviations from the standard Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation process within Workiva. Manual workarounds often introduce errors, increase compliance risks, reduce efficiency, and create an unpredictable closing environment, hindering audit readiness.ProcessMind provides complete transparency into all activities performed, automatically discovering instances where manual steps or unapproved variations occur. By mapping the actual "happy path" versus all deviations, it quantifies their frequency and impact, allowing organizations to either formalize necessary workarounds or eliminate inefficient and risky manual steps to improve compliance and control.

This goal aims to significantly speed up the production of final financial statements after all period close activities, including reconciliation and adjustments, are completed in Workiva. Faster generation ensures timely regulatory filings, provides management with current financial insights, and reduces the pressure associated with tight reporting deadlines.ProcessMind isolates the activities leading up to and including "Financial Statements Generated" and "Financial Statements Reviewed", identifying any preceding delays that cascade into the final reporting phase. It helps uncover bottlenecks in data aggregation, report formatting, or final validation, allowing for targeted optimization of the Workiva reporting workflow and related processes to accelerate delivery.

Improving compliance adherence means ensuring that all Record to Report - Period Close and Reconciliation activities in Workiva consistently follow established regulatory requirements, internal policies, and accounting standards. This reduces the risk of audit findings, financial penalties, and reputational damage, building trust in financial reporting.ProcessMind automatically compares the actual execution of the period close process against defined compliance rules and ideal process models. It highlights every deviation, unapproved step, or missing control point, providing auditors and finance managers with a clear, objective view of compliance gaps and enabling them to enforce stricter adherence across all financial periods.

The 6-Step Improvement Path for Record to Report - Period Close & Reconciliation

1

Download the Template
2

Export Your Workiva Data
3

Upload Your Dataset
4

Analyze Your R2R Process
5

Implement R2R Improvements
6

Monitor R2R Progress
1

Download the Template

What to do

Get the pre-configured Excel template for your Record to Report process. This template ensures your Workiva data is structured correctly for optimal analysis and mapping.

View Data Template Guide Download Template
Why it matters

Using the right data structure from the start is crucial for accurate process mapping and identifying meaningful insights in your period close activities.

Expected outcome

A standardized Excel template ready to be populated with your Workiva R2R data.

WHAT YOU WILL GET

Unlock Faster Workiva Period Close & Reconciliation

ProcessMind transforms complex Workiva Record to Report data into clear, actionable insights. Visualize every step to uncover inefficiencies and accelerate your financial reporting cycle.
  • Pinpoint R2R bottlenecks and delays
  • Streamline Workiva reconciliation steps
  • Accelerate period close cycle times
  • Ensure financial reporting compliance
Discover your actual process flow
Discover your actual process flow
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Analyze process variants
Analyze process variants
Design your optimized process
Design your optimized process

TYPICAL OUTCOMES

Achieving Excellence in Record to Report with Workiva

These outcomes showcase the tangible benefits organizations can realize by applying process mining to their Record to Report, Period Close & Reconciliation processes. Leveraging data from Workiva, these improvements are achieved through identifying bottlenecks and optimizing workflows for enhanced financial close efficiency.

0 %
Faster Period Close

Reduction in end-to-end cycle time

Organizations typically reduce the total time required to complete the period close process, leading to more timely financial reporting and analysis.
0 %
Reduced Adjustments

Lower post-reconciliation adjustment rate

By improving reconciliation quality and data consistency, businesses see a significant drop in the number of manual adjustments needed after initial close, enhancing accuracy.
0 %
Standardized Processes

Fewer process variants across entities

Process mining helps identify and eliminate non-standard deviations in the close process, leading to greater consistency and easier scaling across the organization.
0 %
Improved On-Time Close

Increase in periods meeting deadlines

Organizations increase their ability to complete the financial close by the target date, ensuring regulatory compliance and timely stakeholder communication.
0 %
Faster Review & Approval

Reduced time for critical approvals

Bottlenecks in the review and approval stages of financial statements and reconciliations are identified and resolved, significantly speeding up final sign-off.
0 %
Balanced Workloads

More equitable task distribution

Insights into activity volume variance by user allow for better resource allocation, reducing bottlenecks caused by uneven workload distribution and improving employee satisfaction.

Results can vary based on the specific complexity of your processes and the quality of your data. The figures presented here represent typical improvements observed across various implementations.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Process mining analyzes your actual process execution data to visualize bottlenecks, identify root causes of delays, and uncover deviations from standard procedures. It provides an objective, data-driven view of your period close, highlighting areas for efficiency gains and compliance improvement.

By ingesting event log data from Workiva, process mining reconstructs the entire sequence of activities for each financial period. It then visualizes the flow, showing where tasks take longer than expected, where rework occurs, and which steps contribute most to extended cycle times. This helps pinpoint exact areas causing delays.

To perform process mining for Record to Report, you typically need event logs containing a case identifier, activity name, and timestamp. For Workiva, this means extracting data related to financial period actions, reconciliation statuses, task completions, and user interactions. Additional attributes like user, cost center, or document ID can enrich the analysis.

You can expect to accelerate your Period Close cycle time, streamline reconciliation workflows, and significantly reduce post-reconciliation adjustments. Process mining also helps standardize close processes across entities and improve compliance adherence. Ultimately, it leads to faster, more accurate financial statement generation.

Getting started often involves an initial data extraction and connection phase, which can take a few weeks depending on data availability and complexity. Once data is loaded, initial insights and process visualizations can be generated rapidly, often within days. Deeper analysis and actionable recommendations usually follow within 1-2 months.

Yes, process mining is highly effective in revealing variations in processes across different organizational units. By comparing the execution paths of similar activities across entities, it highlights where standardization is lacking and where best practices can be implemented. This helps ensure consistent and efficient close procedures company-wide.

The primary technical requirement is the ability to extract historical event log data from Workiva in a structured format, such as CSV or database tables. This data typically includes timestamps for each activity, a unique identifier for each financial period, and the activity's name. Integration methods usually involve API connections, direct database exports, or flat file uploads.

Process mining is a non-invasive analysis technique that uses existing historical data. It does not interfere with your live Workiva system or ongoing operations. Data extraction is typically a one-time setup or scheduled task, and the analysis occurs externally, ensuring no disruption to your daily period close activities.

Process mining identifies the root causes of adjustments by analyzing the process leading up to them. It can highlight where data inconsistencies originate, where approvals are missed, or where reconciliations are performed incorrectly. By addressing these upstream issues, the need for costly post-reconciliation adjustments is significantly reduced.

Absolutely. Process mining allows you to define and visualize your ideal compliance paths and then automatically compare these models against actual process executions. It can quickly flag instances where steps were skipped, unapproved deviations occurred, or required controls were not met, providing clear evidence for audits.

Optimize Record to Report Close & Reconciliation Now

Pinpoint bottlenecks, streamline, and cut your cycle time by 30%.

Start Your Free Trial

No credit card required