IntermediateBEHAVIORAL
Describe an instance when you identified and resolved a recurring reconciliation discrepancy with a key stakeholder (e.g., operations or treasury). How did you communicate the issue and implement controls to prevent recurrence?
Accountant
General

Sample Answer

We had a recurring $45K monthly variance between treasury cash reports and our AR aging. I dug into timestamps and found operations was batching receipts daily while treasury posted bank feeds hourly, causing timing mismatches and duplicate manual entries. I met with the treasury manager and ops lead, showed them a two-week audit trail, and proposed a single source of truth: automated bank feed ingestion with a rules-based matching engine and one daily cut-off. After implementing the feed and a reconciliation exception report, discrepancies dropped from $45K to under $2K monthly and the time spent reconciling fell 40%. We also formalized an SLA for posting timing and trained both teams on the new workflow.

Keywords

Investigated root cause via audit trail and timestampsCollaborated with treasury and operations to implement automated bank feedsMeasured impact: variance reduced to <$2K and reconciliation time cut by 40%