Removing Manual Bottlenecks from Cemcoa's Finance Workflows

Shun Shing Group's trading arm replaced a labour-intensive reconciliation and expense process with a fully automated pipeline, cutting manual effort by up to 80 percent.

COMPANY PROFILE

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THE CHALLENGE

A reconciliation cycle built on manual precision, at scale

For a trading company managing high-volume, multi-currency flows across Asia, month-end close is not a formality. It is a logistical exercise. At Cemcoa Limited, the international trading arm of Hong Kong-based Shun Shing Group, that exercise was placing increasing pressure on a lean finance team.

Every month, the team manually processed bank statements from four institutions: HSBC, Standard Chartered, DBS, and HBZ. Each arrived in a different PDF format. Each required a different extraction approach. Every bank advice had to be cross-referenced by hand against the corresponding statement line item, checked against reference tables for account codes, LC mappings, and journal assignments, and then compiled into Excel before review.

The consequences of this approach were predictable. Errors surfaced during audits rather than during processing. Transactions were occasionally misdated at multi-page statement turns. Journal entries were built on data that had not been validated. And because submission windows were concentrated, pressure peaks were significant.

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Expense claims added a parallel burden. Employees submitted receipts in inconsistent formats, often late, with missing fields and incorrect categorisation. Finance staff manually keyed in data from each receipt, looked up exchange rates by hand, and chased employees for supporting documentation. The cycle repeated every period end with little variation and considerable friction.

Anika Ali Chowdhury, Director of HR and Digitalisation, saw the structural dimension of the problem clearly. Cemcoa's ambition was to build a finance function capable of handling growing document volumes without growing headcount, one that was reliable, auditable, and largely self-running. The existing workflows were not just operationally costly. They were a ceiling on where the business needed to go.

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THE SOLUTION

Two workflows redesigned from the ground up

Cemcoa deployed fileAI across both its bank reconciliation and expense claims processes, building an automated pipeline that mapped directly onto how its finance operations were already structured.

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Bank Reconciliation

Finance staff upload bank statements and bank advice documents to fileAI. The platform extracts structured data across all four bank formats simultaneously, then runs a two-way matching process: statement withdrawals against advice line items, validated against reference numbers, transaction dates, and amounts. Where invoice numbers require verification against mapping tables, that happens within the same automated run. The output is a clean, audit-ready journal in XLSX format, with validated entries ready for posting and exceptions clearly flagged for review.

The result is a process that previously consumed hours of careful manual work now completing in minutes. More significantly, exceptions that once surfaced only during audits are now caught during processing, before they can affect downstream entries.

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Expense Claims

The expense claims redesign addressed the problem from both ends: reducing friction for employees submitting claims, and eliminating consolidation work for the finance team reviewing them.

Employees now capture receipts through the fileAI mobile app in under a minute. The system extracts data from the receipt automatically, applies the correct exchange rate based on the document date, and pre-fills comment fields based on expense type, including prompts that request specific context such as which business trip a flight receipt relates to. Where an employee submits a non-standard exchange rate, mandatory supporting documentation is required before the claim is accepted, a compliance control that did not previously exist in any systematic form.

At period end, the finance team exports all validated claims as a structured XLSX file in a single action. The manual consolidation, the back-and-forth over missing documents, and the pressure from late submissions are all substantially reduced.

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THE RESULTS

Measurable gains across both workflows

The impact across both implementations has been material and consistent

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The bank matching workflow has seen an estimated 80 percent reduction in manual effort. Journal generation has moved from hours of careful work to minutes of automated processing. Because exceptions are surfaced during the run rather than discovered later, the close cycle is more predictable and less prone to late-stage surprises.

On the expense side, receipt submission time has dropped to under a minute per employee. Finance and admin teams have seen an estimated 70 percent reduction in processing time at period end. For the first time, Cemcoa has 100 percent enforcement on supporting documentation for non-standard exchange rate submissions, closing a compliance gap that had previously relied entirely on manual oversight.

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