Citizens and Farmer’s (C&F) Bank is a publicly traded financial institution founded in 1927. Based in Virginia with $2 billion in assets, C&F Bank has five subsidiaries and offers community banking, mortgage lending and consumer finance services.
With three separate accounting departments, the month-end close relied heavily on paper, which quickly became burdensome when it came to activities like pulling requests for auditors.
“It was not very efficient. There was a lot of paperwork. My team would prepare the reconciliations, print them out, sign them with all the support, put them on my desk and I would review them on paper. Then we would box them up at the end of the month and store them,” Corporate Controller Matt Guth recalls. “Pretty much every night during the month-end close I would leave work with a huge stack of papers.”
Due to the large volume of reconciliations, after closing there would still be corrections, necessary reviews or even unreconciled accounts. Matt remembered a former client who had a reconciliation tool and how much more efficient it made the process. After consulting with management, C&F Bank discovered they already had a reconciliation tool, which was never fully implemented due to its complexity.
The department chose to move forward with pursuing an alternative solution and evaluated several different options on the market. Essential criteria were cost effectiveness, flexibility and simplicity of use. C&F Bank decided to move forward with SkyStem’s ART as their month-end close solution.
