Companies are moving beyond the initial need to comply with legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and are focusing instead on driving sustainability and control into their corporate processes. Of the various initiatives supporting this shift, the fast close - a concept used to describe a company's ability to complete its accounting cycles and close its books quickly - is perhaps one of the best documented.

Predating the compliance revolution, the fast close forms a finance transformation project that has a clear structure and well-defined methodology, providing huge benefits to those companies that take on the challenge. However, what's arguably the single greatest barrier to the fast close has remained constant - the completion of the intercompany reconciliation process. Surprisingly, this challenge continues to provide a bottleneck that many companies have yet to tackle effectively.

This paper examines the issues behind intercompany reconciliation and outlines how companies can make impressive progress when they employ software solutions such as those from SAP and Business Objects, an SAP company.