Cincinnati Metro Housing Authority
- Rachel Raymond
- Success Stories
- minute(s)Cincinnati Metro Housing Authority chops months of work per year with FHB + Adra Project: Reconciliations Automation Organization: CMHA Platform: Adra by Trintech How It Started 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. Our Approach 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: Understand & document the existing reconciliation processes. Set up the frequency of account preparation, approval, and review. Write custom rules to automatically match as many transactions as possible. Train the CMHA team to use the system and to write their own rules going forward. Test transaction matching through three rounds of rules to maximize the percentage of automatic matches. Provide the team with best practices to simplify and improve matching in the future. How It Went 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.'" The Results 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. What's Next 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?’”
Learn how Cincinnati Metro Housing Authority, with the help of FHB, cut months of work per year out of its reconciliation process by implementing Adra.
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[Workiva + Adra]: An Integration Powered by FHB
- Jamie Black
- Workiva
- minute(s)Adra is a leading software for the automation of the financial close process, while Workiva offers a cloud-based, collaborative platform connecting reports and data. Both solutions are known to save users time and money while improving accuracy and repeatability. And together, they equal more than the sum of their parts. FHB recognized that the combination of Workiva and Adra would offer a uniquely transparent, accurate, and controlled solution for financial close and statutory and regulatory reporting, while streamlining workflow across the entire record-to-report (R2R) process. So, we developed an integration tool to bring you the best of both worlds. Introducing: [Workiva + Adra] At FHB, we have one focus—streamlining and automating processes to lighten the workload of public sector finance and budget teams across North America. To that end, we partner with industry-leading software companies, providing custom implementation of the best available solutions to meet our clients’ needs. Workiva and the Adra Suite of Solutions by Trintech are two such valued partners. Learn more about [Workiva + Adra]. To find out how [Workiva + Adra] can work for you, schedule a call with our expert team.
Reap the combined benefits of Workiva and Adra with FHB's integration tool.
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