The rec that's done
before breakfast.
Bank reconciliation is the quiet reason the close starts from behind. Whatever wasn't tied out during the month becomes week-one archaeology. This fix makes the rec a daily non-event.
Downloaded, pasted, eyeballed, parked.
Most teams run the same morning. Download the bank file. Paste it next to the ledger. Match what matches. Park what doesn't in a growing "to investigate" tab. The clean lines are mindless work. The odd ones (timing differences, bank fees, duplicated payments, unreferenced receipts) each need a small investigation nobody has time for mid-month.
So the odd ones wait. At month-end, the tail of unmatched lines lands on the close's critical path, in the same week as everything else. Many finance teams take more than a week to close, and most have a spreadsheet somewhere inside the close. This one is usually on the list.
Yesterday's activity, tied out by 7am.
Pulls the bank feed before start of day
Every morning the agent collects yesterday's statements across your accounts and lines them up against the ledger. No downloads, no pasting.
Clears the clean matches
References, amounts, dates and agreed tolerances, applied the same way every time. The routine lines are matched and posted before anyone logs in.
Buckets the odd ones by cause
Timing difference, bank fee, duplicate, missing reference: each unmatched line arrives already investigated, with the likely explanation and a suggested entry attached.
Posts what you approve, chases what's missing
Approved entries go into the ledger under the agent's scoped credentials. Items waiting on someone else get chased until they're resolved.
Hands the close a finished rec
By month-end there is no tail. The reconciliation summary rolls straight into the close checklist, with every entry traceable to its evidence.
The guardrails are the product.
Scoped permissions
Read the feeds, match within tolerances, post approved entries. No payments, no transfers, no exceptions to its own rules.
Confidence gate
Anything below the threshold your team set is a suggestion, not an action. The agent proposes; your accountant disposes.
Human review queue
The bucketed exceptions arrive with evidence attached, in the tool your team already uses. A queue you clear in minutes, not a tab you dread.
Full audit trail
Every match, every posting and every approval can be traced end to end. The trail your auditor asks for is produced as a by-product.
The four numbers this fix moves.
Share of elapsed time that is real work: 3% → 12%
Unmatched lines stop queueing for month-end, so the close's critical path gets shorter.
Share of work in the system: 45% → 85%
The download, paste and match routine becomes governed system actions.
Cost per line reconciled
Your accountants review suggestions instead of building matches from scratch. The cost is reconciled to the ledger.
Share done once, no correction: 78% → 93%
Tolerances and rules are applied the same way every day. No more month-end corrections of mid-month shortcuts.
Figures are illustrative, not a client result. Your baseline is measured from your own event logs in a Capacity and Cost Review, system alone and with the off-system work added, and measured again after the fix. The method is Portfolio Process Mining.
Start with your close.
A Capacity and Cost Review measures your reconciliation process on the four numbers in about four weeks. It shows what to fix first and whether an agent pays. Fixed fee, agreed on scope.