Automate bank connectivity and accelerate your financial close with ZoneReconcile

Manual reconciliations are a major drain on finance teams—delaying the close, creating errors, and slowing down reporting. With the launch of ZoneReconcile, you can leave those challenges behind.

Join us for a walk through of the latest release of ZoneReconcile, now with direct bank connectivity to 12,000+ financial institutions.

In this session, you’ll see how to:

• Connect your bank accounts directly into NetSuite with no manual uploads
• Gain real-time visibility into balances and cash position through a single dashboard
• Scale reconciliation processes across multiple entities and subsidiaries
• Shorten your month- and year-end close with 95% faster reconciliations and 99% fewer errors 

You’ll also get a live demo of the new ZoneReconcile dashboard—showing balances, connected banks, and how it all works together to deliver faster, more accurate reporting.

Whether you’re managing a handful of accounts or dozens, you’ll walk away knowing exactly how ZoneReconcile can save you time, reduce errors, and give leadership the visibility they need.

‍

Transcript

‍

Andrea Boyle: So thanks for taking the time to join us. Today's session is all about automating bank connectivity and accelerating your financial close with ZoneReconcile. Today we have a lot to share, share, so let's just jump right into things.

So as I stated, Andrea Boyle, Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Zone & Co. Just a little bit about myself, I have 20 years experience in technology and software, and over 14 years in marketing and over eight years in product marketing.

Like to introduce my co-host, Patrick Norton, who's going to be demoing for us today. Patrick, I'll give you the floor. Introduce yourself.

Patrick Norton: Yeah. Nice to have everybody here. Patrick, Solution Principal at Zone. Been with the company for a little over five years. My job is just to know all of our products at a technical level. Been working in the NetSuite ecosystem for a little over 10 years, and prior to that background in finance and accounting. So looking forward to talking to you all more about bankrec.

Andrea Boyle: Thanks so much Patrick.

So here's the flow for our session today. We're going to start with a quick overview of Zone. Then we're going to jump into talking about challenges teams are facing when it comes to reconciliations, how our bank connectivity feature solves those challenges. And finally, we're going to show you a live demo before opening up that Q&A.

You know, many questions we've heard from finance leaders. What's global? What kind of global coverage do you have? PSP support, whether transactions can be created directly in NetSuite. All of this is going to be addressed in this session, so here we go, Zone & Co. If you're new to Zone & Co. Welcome, Zone & Co is a financial operations platform built for NetSuite.

We have over 4,000 customers worldwide across 57 countries, and our SuiteApps extend NetSuite to cover billing, AP, payroll reporting, and reconciliation. With more than 10 years of NetSuite expertise, our sole focus is making finance operations unstoppable through automation.

We know that most teams are still downloading bank files manually than they try to match those line items by hand. That's tedious, error prone, and it's completely fragmented, especially when you're working across multiple banks, geographies, or PSPs like PayPal and Stripe. This process slows down your close and increases the compliance risk. That's why we build a smarter way to handle reconciliations now with direct bank connectivity and automation inside NetSuite.

So let's highlight one of the biggest time savers, our new bank connectivity feature in ZoneReconcile. ZoneReconcile now connects to over 12,000 banks worldwide worldwide using secure APIs. We also still offer SFTP for those banks that support it. That means you get reliable audit-ready data without the risk of missing transactions.

The biggest benefits to leveraging this type of automation with bank connectivity and ZoneReconcile is up to date cash visibility. You can actually see your cash position across all your connected accounts. The transaction matching happens automatically. That leads to faster month end close, and it reduces friction with your team because less manual work and less risk of errors with manual keying of data.

One of our customers put it best. Catherine shared that bank connectivity alone saves her team up to three hours per bank account every month and across all their accounts. Reconciliation time was cut by 60% since most of you said you're spending over eight hours a month per bank account. Think of the hours your team could be saving, doing this all automatically directly connecting through APIs.

She called it a game changer for visibility, accuracy, and team productivity. And that's exactly the kind of outcome we want all of our customers to achieve. So now let's kick things off to the exciting part. Patrick is going to walk us through a live demo. He's going to show us how ZoneReconcile pulls transactions into NetSuite.

With bank connectivity, you'll see how flexible the matching logic is and so much more. Patrick, floor is yours.

Patrick Norton: Thanks very much. So what I'll start off with is mentioning that. ZoneReconcile lives 100% inside of NetSuite, so you're not logging out into another system. There's no syncing errors or third party integrations. We just live right inside the walls of NetSuite and we built it to save time reconciling bank transactions. So instead of manually entering and matching bank transactions, we're going to automatically reconcile everything in NetSuite, so your invoices and credits, payments and expense reports, based on that transaction feed straight from the bank.

So we released this back in 2013. So really mature product used by hundreds of customers and ultimately helps reduce time errors and frustration resulting from those manual processes.

So some of the things I'll be showing you here today is. Direct connection with the bank. We reconcile, auto-match and create transactions. There's a single source of truth, so combining transaction creation and reconciliation of that bank balance in one action leads to a lot better control reporting and error elimination.

And then, like Andrea was saying, we can manage credit cards and other payment providers too. So not just restricted to bank statements, we can reconcile PSPs, like PayPal, Stripe, that type of thing.

So first things first, I'm going to pop in and hop over to my bank connectivity. So, like Andrea was mentioning, 12,000+ different banks automatically. So we can pull all of the transaction feeds straight in. So we choose the cadence, whether it's monthly, weekly, daily, but what we also give you is a direct connection to look at those balances, and you can have visibility there as well.

So I can see my per subsidiary balances. Struggling in some of these bank accounts and then I can drill in and see those individual bank accounts. So I can see I'm linking them to, to some kinda random GL accounts, but I have full visibility into this. And then again, by subsidiary. If I have any international banks, I would see those broken out as well.

And then it's really easy just to link any others that I might need. So we do still have the capability to import, so your CSV, BAI, BAI2, MT940, OFX, whatever it might be.

And if I pop back into my dashboard, I can pop in and I can see new statements that I've been pulled in by that connection. So I can pop in here. I can pop in to my statements to process, and essentially what we do, we pull in those bank feeds automatically match them up to NetSuite transaction, and then we pop in and manage by exception in the bank statement page.

So this is where we're going to be reconciling out of. At the header we have all those. sort of, header level fields that you would expect, the subsidiary, currency, date range, balances, that type of thing. I can add custom fields up here. And then on the lines are our statement lines and lots of data out of the box. But same thing, I can add additional columns here. Maybe I use some custom segmentation to organize my, my reporting. I could bring that in. No problem.

Something that I'll point our attention to. Is over on the right hand column, we have a matching reason. So is that based on counterparty? Is it based on transaction parameters like the ID or some other parameter that we set up custom? So it's going to tell us why it matched up automatically.

In, in the left hand side, I have a select column, and we're managing by exception, like I mentioned. So anything that's not, that is not, yes, I need to pop in and manage. In a live environment, I'd expect a lot higher volume of yeses, but wouldn't have much to demo here if I add them all auto match.

So let's look at the first line here. Academy Avenue Liquor Store. I can see that select is, yes. And in this case, in my bank description here, I have the invoice number, so invoice 12 and in my transaction column. These are the transactions inside of NetSuite that the system has automatically matched against.

So it's picked up the same invoice. When select is yes, it's telling me that the amount paid was the amount owed on the invoice, so if this was a partial payment, we still would've had that matching reason in the right hand column. But I wouldn't have select is yes, and that would tell me to investigate it further.

So in, in the situation like Fabre Enterprises here, I don't have any reference here and I don't have anything matched up. So what I can do is I can click into the popup screen and this is going to give me the available transactions for this counterparty and if there's a huge volume, I could then use some of these filters. But in this case, I can see that there's two transactions for $124 and because I didn't have my invoice number and I didn't have any other date rules or anything like that set up. I can just select the one that's appropriate, submit this. I'll see select is yes, and I can just move on.

So maybe I want to prepay a vendor so this can come in on the bank and I don't even need to go into the popup. I can just move on. And what we'll do is we'll create a posting against that vendor that can later be applied to a bill.

I might have a line like this one here where I don't have a lot of supporting information, so I could investigate this further, but I could just as easily pop in and code this to say miscellaneous expense and just move on to the other options.

So in this case, I might already have an account selected automatically. So how did that happen? Well, we have this concept of matching rules in ZoneReconcile, and I'll give you a little look under the hood here. And what these are going to allow me to do is. We're able to give it a unique name, and then I'm saying if the description contains transportation, then I'd like to set the travel expense account, and while I'm at it, I'll set the department.

Now I can add additional fields to hit here if I want to, I can apply to a specific bank account or group of bank accounts. In this case, we're just applying it to everything, both debits and credits. So again, if the description contains transportation, travel expense, set that department.

So when I pop back in here. We do indeed have transportation here, and that's why we've made those selections. So I can just pop in and move on here to two of my favorite examples, and I'll pop into the popup for Mackenzie Corporation. In this case, I'm receiving $1980, but it's relating to this $2,000 invoice, so I can check the box here and I could submit this leaving $20 unpaid, but more than likely, that's some kind of bank fee. So we have this payment difference reason here, and I can select one of those for bank fees, and it's going to create a corresponding $20 journal entry for that difference.

I could also set this up with tolerance values, so I could say, as long as it's within 1%, 2%, let's automatically select the payment difference reason. If it exceeds that we'll have to pop in here and make that selection ourselves so we can automate that to your level of, of desire there.

And then last but not least, I could have a situation where. A transaction was created that's not in the functional currency of my subsidiary. So in this case, I have a Euro invoice and I'm being paid in dollars. So I'm going to have my NetSuite exchange rate here, but almost positively, not the exact same exchange rate used by the bank. And what will occur when I click this box is we'll recalculate the exchange rate used by the bank.

Now I can just click submit and without ZoneReconcile, we would've needed to manually calculate that exchange rate. We need, would need it to enter it into NetSuite, make sure there's no rounding difference or things like that on the payment. But instead we can just check this box. Submit this, same thing, we can set up tolerances here and we could even create a journal for the difference for the FX variance if we wanted to.

So with this, I have all of my selects as yes here and I could at any point save this and come back to it. So we're sort of halfway through on Friday afternoon, I could always come back to this on Monday, but since I have everything, I'm going to click save. And what the system's going to do now is it's not only filing this reconciliation and creating some out of the box reporting that we can utilize, but it's also creating the associated transactions for this environment.

So my, my goal would be to maintain my $0 difference. Not have any red banners or anything like that for potential errors. And then I can just validate the transactions that were created so I can see my payments, I can see that best practice for vendor prepayments here. A check for Lyft, this could have just as easily been a journal entry. I have my customer payment and my $20 journal, and then I have my miscellaneous expense journal here.

And I can pop in get into my reporting that's out of the box and print that out. And I could also distribute it however I might want by exporting it to a CSV. I have all my reconciled credits and debits we can drill in here. Drill in a step further, see the actual transaction that was created and just a lot of visibility into this.

And beyond that, we have really good starting records for reporting in the lines of the statement. So we have the, the length transaction segmentation and things like that so we can create really powerful reports off the state as well.

So with that kind of the bread and butter of ZoneReconcile where we're pulling in those automatic feeds from the bank, auto matching them from with transactions and NetSuite, and then we just pop in and manage by exception saving a ton of time on, on reconciliations. So with that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen for a moment. Thanks for watching that.

What we're going to see here as well is some feature comparisons between ZoneReconcile and NetSuite, so you can scan through here. There's a bunch of of benefits to ZoneReconcile over NetSuite, just to give you that much more automation and flexibility when you're processing your bank reconciliations.

So I'm going to pass it back over to Andrea here. But again, I just wanna thank everybody for your time.

Andrea Boyle: Patrick, that was amazing. Thank you so much. So before we jump into the Q&A, because we have lots of questions. You know, one of the big benefits over the bank connectivity functionality that ZoneReconcile brings also is it's very easy to set up.

If anybody on this call has ever had to set up some of the integrations with NetSuite, it can be very complicated. And you might need a certain level of expertise. This, the API connectivity- you go through a wizard and it walks you through the entire process. You connect to the bank, no paperwork to sign, no crazy anything. It's a very seamless process, all in NetSuite in ZoneReconcile.

So with that being said, Patrick, let's jump on over to the Q&A and go ahead and pop in in there and look. We have a bunch of questions that I'd like you to go ahead and answer.

Patrick Norton: Yeah, so looks like the, the benefit of ZoneReconcile over native NetSuite, which we were just looking at.

But can we go back and amend a previous reconciliation without having to delete all? And yes, we could. I could get in here and amend just one single line of this reconciliation too. So if this something was off with this customer payment, whatever the case may be, I can delete the single payment transaction and I would be able to, to adjust it however I might want.

And next one is, which parameters can be used for custom matching rules and reconcile? Well, we can set them up ourselves to be custom. So it can really be whatever you would want it to be. We could even do many-to-one matches. So if you were using electronic payments in NetSuite, often the bank's going to return one line no matter how many of those are actually in the GL and we could use like payment batch id and then you would see many transactions to one statement transaction.

And, sorry, skipped over Tony's question. What is the basis of matching? All of our bank entries are entered with a bank reference, which appears on the statement, but the statement has a few extra letters. So if we need to cut off leading zeros or something like that, we can just tell the system how we would do that in our, in our configuration, and we would be able to have those match up appropriately.

What are the costs per bank connection and what are the concrete benefits of a direct connection compared to an SFTP connection? We're currently using an SFTP connection to our RERE system where we have all our bank accounts and from which we select the accounts we send of the reconcile and NetSuite. So, benefits there are, it's actually a direct connection with a bank, so it's not like an intermediary server. So SFTPs definitely get the job done, but it's not like a direct connection. It can be a little bit more cumbersome if you wanna do things like daily, weekly, monthly, if you want to change those sort of statuses and then we're able to give you that live view and the interface where you're able to interact with all those bank balances rather than logging into your banks.

Can you determine the type of transaction the system makes upon save? For example, in case of saving a prepaid vendor invoice, the system should create a journal on the vendor. Yep, a hundred percent. Rather than what we saw in the bank statement, we could have created a journal absolutely, that we could have applied.

Same thing here with Lyft, where I have a check being created. I could add a journal created there as well.

Is it also linked with banks in India, Germany, Italy, and Norway? Most of these banks are direct connected inside of the us but we're working on the international bank connections as well.

Andrea Boyle: I can confirm that European banks, we will have Germany, Italy, and Norway Banks released next week. India. That may be a question mark, but we can definitely support the other regions.

Patrick Norton: And then do we need to import the data via CSV or can we connect the bank through the API? We would use our bank connection, which is an API. And if you need to, for whatever reason, you could absolutely import a CSV, BAI, MT940, whatever you want.

If you set, if you set up payment tolerance of 1%, can that be set at the individual customer level? So for example, if X, Y, Z pays us, that is a good question on the level. I can get back to you on, on the level in which we can set that.

And then do we need to migrate from ZoneReconcile to ZoneReconcile 2 for the connectivity feature, is it native to ZoneReconcile, or paid add-on? Andrea, do you have the payment info?

Andrea Boyle: So definitely you're going to wanna speak to your account manager a little bit more. If you already have ZoneReconcile, it is a paid upgrade, but your account manager will help you figure the right plan that works for you and your organization.

Patrick Norton: And are there any controls around duplicates? If there are any issue with the bank feed, we do call out duplicates. Yes. So if you pop into the actual reconciliation itself, you'll be able to see that it's flagging potential duplicates.

Let's see. Is it also linked with banks in Sweden? That it sounds like is going to be released next week.

And when transactions have bank fees in the bank, we see both before and after amount. So Zone, can we choose to see the before deduction amount and add a bank fee amount? Yeah, absolutely. So we could actually create that difference as well automatically.

Andrea Boyle: Patrick, that wraps up our Q&A. That was awesome.

Thank you everybody for engaging with us and providing this wonderful room for us to be able to talk about bank connectivity. Patrick, thank you so much for the wonderful walkthrough. Everybody. Enjoy the rest of your week and have an amazing close. Thank you everybody.