A Study on the Effectiveness of Excel-Based Reconciliation Techniques in Accounts Payable Management

This OJT report documents the practical learning acquired by me during my internship at PACCAR India Pvt. Ltd., Pune, in the Accounts Payable function of the Finance and Accounting department. The overall internship engagement with the organisation spans six months, from 7 July 2026 to 7 January 2027; in line with the OJT component of the MBA programme, this report is based on the first two months of that engagement, from 7 July 2026 to 7 September 2026. The training was undertaken under the academic guidance of Dr. Sujata Deshmukh and the company guidance of Ms. Amy Han, General Accounting Supervisor. The central theme of the project is a practical study of Excel-based reconciliation techniques used within an SAP-driven Accounts Payable process. At PACCAR India, invoice processing, journal entries and vendor master data are managed in SAP, but the actual reconciliation of AP balances against vendor statements and the General Ledger is performed separately in Microsoft Excel, using formulas such as VLOOKUP, SUMIFS and Nested IF, together with conditional formatting. The work covered SAP data extraction, data clean-up, discrepancy identification, root-cause analysis, timing of reconciliation cycles and comparison with a fully system-based approach. The internship demonstrated that the reliability of Excel-based reconciliation depends heavily on the quality of the underlying SAP export, the discipline of the person performing the reconciliation, and the consistency of the formulas and checks applied. Timing differences and data-formatting issues were the most frequent discrepancies observed, while GL coding errors and duplicate entries, though less frequent, took longer to resolve. Reconciliation time did not scale in a strictly linear way with dataset size, because larger datasets carried proportionally more discrepancies to investigate, not simply more rows to review. The report follows the Project Based OJT structure prescribed in the university handbook, adapted to focus solely on practical insight rather than secondary literature. It includes sector analysis, company analysis, objectives, detailed methodology, task-wise observations, findings, separately stated challenges, conclusion, limitations, learnings, recommendations and appendices. Overall, the OJT strengthened technical understanding of Accounts Payable reconciliation and developed professional competencies such as spreadsheet-based financial analysis, attention to detail, data-quality awareness, root-cause thinking, communication, deadline management and process documentation.