| Project: | Reconciliations Automation |
| Organization: | CMHA |
| Platform: | Adra by Trintech |
In October of 2023, Monica Mitchell joined the Cincinnati Metro Housing Authority (CMHA) as an Account Reconciliation Specialist. The organization had been using Excel to manage monthly financial closing, but they recognized their need for automation and a more standardized, repeatable reconciliation process.
First, they created Monica’s role for the purpose of managing that process. Then, they hired FHB to configure and implement a new financial-close-automation software, Adra by Trintech.
Shortly thereafter, three key team members transitioned away from the project, and Monica needed assistance in handling the software implementation and monthly reconciliations.
FHB's objective at the project’s outset was to implement three of CMHA’s largest bank accounts in Adra Matcher and Balancer. Our approach:
When we spoke with Monica, she had nothing but praise for FHB’s implementation team. “Jill [FHB Principal Consultant Jill Moats, CPA] was awesome,” she said. “She was very patient. It was kind of chaotic over here [amid staffing changes]. But she was very good at getting us to focus and answering our questions. Jill is very, very good at getting to the core of the problem and giving an explanation in plain English,” she said.
"I appreciated the fact that Jill is an accountant and that she's done reconciliations.”
–Monica Mitchell, Account Reconciliation Specialist, Cincinnati Metro Housing Authority
“I have a lot of experience with implementations, and programmers always think it's a great thing to implement new software, but they never think about the end user and whether it makes sense to them. I think that FHB takes that into account, especially during implementation, asking, ‘How will you use this?’ I found that really helpful.”
“I am somebody who learns much better by having someone guide me through than by trying to figure it out on my own...what happens with going it alone is that you get so far and then you run into a wall. And then it takes days to get the wall torn down. And you forget what you were doing before you hit the wall. I appreciated having Jill to say, ‘maybe you should look at it this way.'"
For Monica, the implementation by FHB couldn’t have come at a better time. "Having the tools to handle [reconciliations] makes it all so much easier,” she said.
Now that it’s up and running, the solution saves Monica weeks of work.
“I also picked up [responsibility for] what we call the lock box—our Low-Income Public Housing or LIPH main. My former colleague used to struggle with that; you should see those Excel reconciliations. He tried to explain to me how he did it in Excel, and I said, ‘No. I don't even understand what you're saying.' When I took it over, I said, ‘I can’t do that account without Adra.’”
Now, only a small percentage of open items remain unmatched, mostly due to timing. “I'm [reconciling] it within 0.5 percent, so, I'm happy with that,” Monica said.
“Another of our big accounts is the HAP HCV (Housing Assistance Payments Housing Choice Voucher), which includes 18,000 transactions every month,” she said. The auto-matched transactions for that account are around 98 percent, meaning now, they only need to review around 250 of those 18,000 transactions monthly.
Monica anticipates enlisting the help of FHB for future work. “Now that I've really bought into it, I can start convincing other people that they can buy into it. Some have the attitude, ‘why do we need new tools if we can just do it in Excel?’”