When Vendor Central Reports Don't Match ERP Financials?
Financial reconciliation is seen as an important yet labor-intensive exercise for vendors who are operating on Amazon Vendor Central. Vendor Central generates Settlement reports, chargebacks, and sales data which will be compared with the company's ERP financial system to reconcile the data.
But, like most sellers, many vendors also face the following problem: financial ledgers won’t reconcile with Vendor Central information.
Common Data Mismatches
- Invoices vs. Payments: ERP-generated invoices may differ from Amazon payments and may not coincide with the payment timings or discounts.
- Unmapped Chargebacks and Deductions: Amazon chargebacks and shortage claims can take a while to record in the ERP, leaving a reconciliation gap.
- Structural Data Differences: Vendor Central Reports are in intricate fields and non-standard formats; hence it is extremely time-consuming to match it against ERP data.
- Manual Reconciliation Overload: Finance teams spend far too much time downloading reports and cross-referencing records by hand which is both inefficient and prone to errors.
Why Reconciliation Issues Matter
- Heavy workload: The accounting department takes up a considerable amount of time consolidating and matching up.
- Cash flow variance: Mismatches that go unbalanced continue building mismatches between projections and results.
- Audit risk: Recurrent inaccuracies imply a lack of financial openness and conformity.
How to Fix It: Automation Is the Key to Resolving Vendor Central vs. ERP Reconciliation Problems
If you are spending that much time and resource to manually reconcile all your data, the only way you know how, automation will significantly simplify and speed up the process.
- Automated report extraction and transformation: Automatically fetch payment, deduction, and sales reports from Vendor Central and normalize for the ERP system.
- Smart reconciliation and matching: Automatically reconcile ERP invoices to Vendor Central data, highlighting discrepancies upon receipt.
- Real-time monitoring and alerts: Synchronize chargebacks, shortages, and deductions to ERP in real-time, eliminating missed charges.
How Windingflow Helps
Windingflow provides the purpose-built Vendor Central – ERP reconciliation automation product to address these problems:
- Automated report sync: Pull and normalize Vendor Central reports for ERP system integration.
- Smart matching engine: Perform quick matching of invoices, payments, and deductions, identifying discrepancies.
- Clear diffs tracking: Gives an easy way to see a detailed breakdown of mismatches for resolution.
- Scalable integration: Integrates with a variety of ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, etc.) and multiple business cases.
Benefits of Using Windingflow
- Labor saving: Reduces manual reconciliation effort by over 70%.
- Increased accuracy: Automatic validation reduces the number of reconciliation mistakes.
- Improved financial disclosure: Provides confidence that ERP records match Vendor Central information, satisfying audit requirements.
- Improved cash flow control: The ability to see payments and deductions in real-time makes financial forecasting more robust.
Conclusion
Mismatch between Vendor Central reports and ERP Financials is a common struggle for Amazon vendors. Manual matching is time-consuming, error-prone, and not scalable.
By using the Windingflow automated reconciliation solution, suppliers gain the ability to have reporting seamlessly integrated, data matched with intelligence, and variances tracked with transparency, which can result in a faster, more accurate and easier-to-trust financial reconciliation process.
