At Glean AI, we recently released one of our most exciting new features  - “Automated Prepay Amortizations.”

According to the rules of GAAP accounting, companies cannot recognize expenses for services not yet provided. For example, if a company makes an upfront, annual payment of $12,000 to Monster Analytics for services to be provided from February 21, 2022 through February 20, 2023, it cannot recognize the full $12,000 expenditure as an expense when the bill is received. It has to amortize the expenditure over the 12-month period during which Monster Analytics provides the contracted services.  This is called a “prepaid expense,” and is the bane of existence for many accounting teams.  Specifically, due to the lack of automation in traditional AP Automation and expense management tools, Accounting teams manage prepaids through a very manual (and error-prone) process using spreadsheets to track outstanding prepaid balances and amounts to be expensed in given periods.

Work Faster and More Accurately

In the words of one Glean customer, “We used to waste several hours each month booking prepaid entries and reconciling the amortized expenses.  Thankfully, that’s not the case anymore with Glean AI.”  In 2022, Glean AI launched an industry first - automated prepaid amortization schedules - to help Finance teams save time creating journal entries and reconciling Prepaid Expense balances.

The way it works is simple.

• Glean AI processes your invoice and extracts all relevant fields, including service dates.
• For service dates greater than one month, we’ll flag that a potential Prepaid Expense amortization has been detected.

• Once you click to “Set Up” the amortization schedule, you’ll be presented with the following screen, with fields pre-populated by Glean AI’s invoices extraction engine.  Make any required edits and then click “Generate Schedule” to generate the schedule of future journal entries.

• Based on your inputs, Glean AI next generates the schedule of journal entries to be created each month to credit the prepaid account and debit your expense account.  As you might expect, the scheduler offers a lot of flexibility. Each entry can be edited to ensure the dates, amounts, and categories for each entry are as desired.

• Once the amortization schedule is saved, Glean AI will automatically create and sync the approved journal entries to your GL system (e.g., Quickbooks) on each of the approved dates on the schedule.

Closing the books each month takes a lot of time and requires significant attention to detail.  A common problem we hear from Accounting teams is around how long and error-prone it is to manage and reconcile their prepaid expense balances.  Today, that process is very manual and executed mostly in spreadsheets outside GL systems.  But now, with Glean AI’s just-launched automated prepaid amortization schedules, Accounting teams are shaving hours off their close process each month because the entire bookkeeping and journal entry creation process is automated by Glean AI.  No outside spreadsheets are required!  This is just one of many time-saving benefits offered by Glean AI that also improve accounting accuracy and reduce the risk of human error.

To see a demo of this feature, which has quickly become one of the most used and loved by Glean AI customers, please click here.

To learn more about Glean AI or to schedule a demo or trial, please contact us at hello@glean.ai.

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