Four entities, two ERPs, and an intercompany process that finally closes on time.
Harlow grew through acquisition faster than its finance org, and intercompany elimination alone was taking three to four days every close across four entities split between two ERP systems. The finance team wasn't trying to patch the process — they were trying to stop rebuilding it by hand every time they bought another company.
Reconciliation Agent + Vendor AgentThe bottleneck
Intercompany reconciliation required pulling trial balances from two different ERPs (NetSuite and an acquired entity still running QuickBooks) by hand and mapping between two different charts of accounts with over a dozen undocumented exceptions.
A single AP coordinator spent most of her week sending W-9 requests, chasing missing documentation, and answering vendor payment status emails across all four entities — work that scaled linearly with every acquisition.
Bank reconciliation for each entity's accounts was done separately, with no consistent process for flagging timing differences versus real discrepancies, so every entity effectively reinvented its own method.
The chart-of-accounts exceptions lived in one senior accountant's head rather than in any documented mapping, which meant intercompany close stalled completely on the two weeks a year she was out.
The workflow
The Reconciliation Agent now pulls trial balances from both ERPs automatically, applies Harlow's chart-of-accounts mapping including its documented exceptions, and proposes elimination entries with the reasoning attached line by line.
The undocumented mapping exceptions got written down for the first time as part of setup — turning tribal knowledge into a rule set the agent (and any future hire) can actually reference.
Bank reconciliation runs the same way across all four entities: exact matches clear automatically, and timing differences get flagged with a suggested match instead of a blank worksheet, so no entity is running its own ad hoc process anymore.
The Vendor Agent took over W-9 and documentation requests, payment status replies, and collections outreach on a defined schedule across all four entities, freeing the AP coordinator to handle only the disputes that actually needed a human judgment call.
“We acquired our way into a mess of two ERPs and four charts of accounts. This is the first close where intercompany didn't feel like the thing standing between us and being done.”
Corporate Controller, Harlow Consumer Brands
Lessons learned
Write down the tribal knowledge before you automate around it
Harlow's chart-of-accounts exceptions only existed in one accountant's head. Documenting them as part of setup was as valuable as the automation itself — it removed a single point of failure that had nothing to do with software.
Multi-ERP doesn't require a single ERP first
Harlow didn't wait to consolidate onto one system before automating reconciliation across two. Bridging what exists is usually faster and cheaper than forcing a migration project just to make automation easier later.
Standardize the process before you scale the headcount problem
Each entity had its own ad hoc bank rec method before this, which meant every acquisition added not just volume but a new process to maintain. One consistent method across all four entities meant the fifth acquisition won't need a fifth process.
Free up your specialist for the judgment calls, not the volume
The AP coordinator didn't lose her job to automation, she lost the 90% of it that was routine email. What's left is the small set of actual disputes, which is both more useful to the business and more interesting for her to do.
“I used to block my calendar every close just for vendor email. Now I only hear about the accounts that are actually in dispute, which is maybe three a month instead of thirty.”
AP Coordinator, Harlow Consumer Brands