McDonald’s Automates and Streamlines Reconciliation and Close Processes

Situation  

The McDonald’s Corporation is the world’s second-largest private employer with 2 million employees. Their revenue comes from rent, royalties, and fees paid by franchisees, as well as sales in company-operated restaurants. Given the volume and complexity of McDonald’s transaction information across domestic and international locations, they sometimes experienced workflow bottlenecks in the account reconciliation process.

McDonald’s needed to automate their complex manual reconciliation and close processes across international locations. As a publicly traded company, any inaccuracy in financial information posed a risk for audit, and the accounting team sometimes found it cumbersome to pinpoint irregularities in the reconciliation process due to their Excel-based approach.  

Action

McDonald’s partnered with Centroid and elected to explore options in automating high-volume transaction accounts with Oracle’s Transaction Matching and Account Reconciliation Cloud Service. Through a tailored implementation project, Centroid aimed to streamline the close process and gain visibility into the health of their account reconciliations. The project focused on reducing the monthly close cycle and enabling the finance organization to spend more time analyzing data rather than preparing it.

Impact

Centroid reduced McDonald’s monthly close cycle by 3 days and automated approximately 60% of their reconciliations, leading to a 20% increase in efficiency across the finance department. This allowed the finance team to spend more time analyzing data rather than preparing it. Oracle’s technology reduced McDonald’s dependence on Excel and provided the Controllership with tools to enforce compliance and standardization across the enterprise, significantly improving the accuracy and reliability of financial information.