Case Study - RedCloud

Customer profile

RedCloud is an innovative and dynamic technology business headquartered in the UK, with offices in Argentina, Peru and Nigeria and footprint in several other countries. RedCloud has developed an advanced digital ecosystem that enables real-time visibility for order & inventory management, cashless payments & transaction history, invoice tracking, market intelligence, loyalty programs and promotional campaigns. The platform delivers rich functionalities for customer engagement and increased revenue through cross and upsales. It serves small and local businesses from the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods vertical, including brands, distributors, and merchants.

Process challenges

RedCloud wished to address the effects of global expansion on its reconciliation workload. Bank statements reconciliation was historically performed in spreadsheets: comparing online payments plus batches of offline transactions with the internal records. Semi-manual data processing posed restrictions on the quick settlement of ever increasing data volumes.

RedCloud handled reconciliation input from multiple sources and counterparts – partners, external agents, and banks. Data was sorted and normalized manually prior to the matching itself. This preparation step alone was time-consuming and called for automation.

The RedCloud team also wanted to streamline and automate the matching and exception management portion of their process. This required the ability to handle complex matching relationships (1-to-many, many-to-many, splits and groupings) and exception scenarios.

The Solution

In the course of the selection, the end-to-end automation capabilities of ReconArt strongly resonated with the RedCloud team. ReconArt was a perfect fit for complex, large volume transactional matching that needed to be performed with high frequency and precision.

Today input data from disparate sources automatically populates the reconciliation accounts. The system applies the necessary data cleaning and enrichment operations without human intervention.

Reconciliation at the transaction level can now be executed with user-selected degree of automation – from the traditional manual tying of selected lines, all the way to completely hands-off scheduled match across all accounts. Rule-driven matching by multiple criteria increased the successful match rates. ReconArt also supports matching by amount with predefined variance tolerance.

ReconArt provides comprehensive features for exceptions identification and automated labeling to streamline the investigation and resolution of outstanding items. As a result, the categorization of any bank fees, commissions, taxes, and currency differences happens instantly.

RedCloud is particularly diligent about process documentation, audit trail, and separation of roles. With ReconArt, the client has utilized granular user access controls at account and functional level.

Benefits & Results

Since going live with ReconArt in 2019, RedCloud has reported more stable operations with fewer discrepancies even for the most complex and challenging reconciliations. With benefits made evident, the solution scope expanded. RedCloud operates on a global scale, with distributed reconciliation teams introduced to the system. Navigating multiple accounts and data sources on daily basis is much easier and straightforward.

ReconArt is a fully configurable solution which accommodates continuous process improvements. RedCloud recognizes the importance of well tested and validated set of match rules to cover every scenario. The client leverages a system which supports their constant efforts to fine tune the match rules and reduce exceptions.

From day one the RedCloud reconciliation team demonstrated impressive commitment to explore and harness the full potential of ReconArt as a total reconciliation lifecycle solution. After the initial implementation which ran in parallel with a fruitful on-the-job training, RedCloud team members emerged as independent and fully self-sufficient users. Currently, the RedCloud users administrate the systems with confidence, onboarding new processes and rebuilding old ones.

RedCloud’s team is continuously expanding their footprint with ReconArt, and the users are taking advantage of every new system upgrade.

We look forward to continuing this successful partnership in the future.