The "Tracking Only" Trap

Your team is finally implementing it: a powerful new system like Oracle ARCS, promising to automate, standardise, and de-risk the financial close. The goal is clear—to leave behind messy spreadsheets and manual processes for a future of real-time visibility and control.

But during the intense pressure of implementation, a tempting shortcut emerges. For those "too complex" accounts, the path of least resistance seems like a pragmatic compromise. This is the siren song of the "Tracking Only" format—a feature that allows teams to get a green checkmark in the new system while keeping their old, offline processes. It feels like an easy win for overworked teams, but it’s a trap that transforms a powerful automation engine into a simple file cabinet, negating the very reason for your investment.

The "Tracking Only" format is almost always introduced as a temporary "bridge" solution. The plan is to get complex accounts into the system quickly and then circle back later to re-architect the underlying process.

The problem lies in organizational inertia. Once the implementation project loses momentum and the consultants have moved on, these temporary workarounds become permanent fixtures. What was meant to be a short-term fix solidifies into the standard operating procedure.

In my 20 years of experience—including my time as a CFO and Global Intercompany Manager—I’ve learned a universal truth in Finance: All things "temporary" inevitably become permanent.

At its core, the "Tracking Only" format allows a team to get a "Green Checkmark" in the system while the actual reconciliation work remains hidden in an offline tool like Excel. This creates an illusion of automation and progress on dashboards, but the true work remains manual, opaque, and disconnected.

By bypassing the system’s internal logic, you are paying for world-class software but forfeiting its most critical capabilities. Specifically, you lose:

System-Enforced Integrity: You still rely on a human to manually verify the offline work before uploading it. The system isn't validating the reconciliation; it's only tracking its completion status.
Real-Time Visibility: The "why" behind the numbers remains hidden within an attached file. Stakeholders cannot see the details of the reconciliation within the tool until the task is closed.
Standardisation: Different teams continue using their own inconsistent methods in offline workbooks. This lack of a consistent control environment is a major concern for auditors.
True Audit Defense: You lose a clear, centralized, and standardized audit trail within the system, forcing auditors to hunt for files and manually piece together the reconciliation logic from various spreadsheets.
Process Fragility: Reliance on bespoke offline files makes the process dependent on specific individuals and difficult to scale or hand off to new team members.

Using "Tracking Only" because a reconciliation is "too complex for ARCS" is a symptom of a deeper issue. This approach is a classic case of "paving the cow path"—using new technology to simply reinforce an old, inefficient way of working. It digitizes a broken workflow instead of re-engineering it.

The implementation of a new system is the golden opportunity to stop and fix the root cause, rather than covering it up with a workaround. It forces you to ask the critical questions this shortcut allows you to avoid:

1. Is the data source messy?
2. Are the matching rules unclear?
3. Is the accounting policy outdated?

To be clear, there are rare, pragmatic exceptions. A highly specialized statutory requirement or a legacy system that cannot export data might necessitate using "Tracking Only" as a necessary evil. But these cases should be the documented exceptions with a planned sunset date, not the rule. For everything else, the implementation should be used to fix the problem by adopting best practices and ensuring every department is held to the same high standard.

The goal of implementing a system like Oracle ARCS isn't just to track old work in a new place; it is to fundamentally transform the work itself. By leaning on workarounds like "Tracking Only," organizations miss the opportunity for meaningful process improvement.

This approach is the equivalent of paying for a Ferrari but only using the glovebox—a powerful tool reduced to a glorified document storage site.

Take a hard look at your implementation and your processes. Is your new technology truly transforming your processes, or just putting a new screen on old problems?