A 300-line bank statement keyed in by hand is a full day’s work. And at the end of that day, nobody has yet checked whether the entries are right. This is the paradox of many finance teams and accounting firms in the OHADA zone: time goes into data entry, and review, which is the real value of the job, is done quickly at month end, when time is left.
The problem: data entry eats review
Manual entry has three costs, and the first is not the worst.
- Time. Every statement line, supplier invoice and expense report means opening a screen, choosing an account, typing an amount. Multiplied by a month’s volume, it is most of the week.
- Errors. Swapped digits, a wrong account, an invoice entered twice. The faster you key in, the more you get wrong, and those errors surface at year end.
- Delay. The books run four to six weeks behind. Management steers on last month’s figures, or last quarter’s.
An accountant trained to analyse a margin, justify a balance or prepare a year end spends their days on work a machine does better.
How it is done today
In most SMEs, documents arrive in bulk (paper, photos, PDFs in emails) and are keyed in as they come or at month end. In firms, the client’s famous “box of documents” arrives at filing or year-end time. OCR tools sometimes help read an invoice, but the entry is still composed by hand. Allocation rules, when they exist, live in the accountant’s head.
The method: review instead of keying in
Bookkeeping organised for review rests on five steps.
1. Capture at the source
Transactions must come in without re-keying: bank and Mobile Money statements imported, supplier invoices read automatically, customer invoices issued in the software that generate their own entry. Every transaction captured at the source is an entry nobody types.
2. Categorise by rules
Most transactions repeat: rent, the telecom subscription, fuel, bank charges. One rule (“a description containing ORANGE goes to telecom expenses”) handles all of them, this month and the next. For the rest, the software suggests the category of a past transaction with a similar description: the accountant accepts or corrects in one click.
3. Review by exception
Instead of rereading everything, you only look at what falls outside the norm:
- transactions without a category;
- documents without supporting evidence;
- accounts with an abnormal balance (a customer in credit, a bank in credit);
- the suspense account, which must be empty at every year end;
- unusual amounts for a contact or a category.
4. Validate in bulk
When documents are complete, they are validated in batches, not one by one. Validation should process what is ready and explain what is not, rather than stopping at the first incomplete document.
5. Check through balances
Accuracy is proven by balances: the bank reconciled with the statement, customer and supplier accounts matched, the trial balance balanced. If these three checks come out right, so do the entries.
What must stay human
Automating data entry does not mean automating responsibility.
- Rules get reviewed. A badly written rule is wrong on every transaction it touches. Review them with every new activity or new supplier.
- Validation stays a decision. It seals the entries: a person triggers it, and a company can require approval before certain validations.
- Exceptional transactions (asset disposal, dispute, provision) require judgement: they are not handled by rule.
The indicators that show it works
| Indicator | What it measures | Reasonable target |
|---|---|---|
| Share of transactions categorised by rule or suggestion | The degree of automation | Over 70% after a few months |
| Time between month end and up-to-date books | Freshness of figures | A few days, not a few weeks |
| Documents without supporting evidence at month end | Quality of the file | Close to zero |
| Suspense account balance at year end | Rigour of classification | Zero |
How we organise it at SynkriaOps
In SynkriaOps, bank and Mobile Money statements are imported, supplier invoices are read by OCR, and a validated customer invoice generates its entry in the sales journal. Uncategorised transactions land in To categorize, with suggestions from rules or similar transactions; Apply rules processes all new lines at once after an import.
The list of accounting documents filters on unclassified documents or those missing supporting evidence. A selection, even a mixed one, is completed in batches (counterpart, journal, VAT account) and Validate N ready entries validates everything that is ready, with a report of what was skipped and why. If the company has an approval workflow, the documents concerned wait for sign-off before being sealed. On the firm side, Ask the client requests missing supporting documents in one click, document by document.
The step-by-step guides are in the help centre:
Also read: Accounting for Mobile Money under SYSCOHADA and Financial lineage.