Financial reconciliation

Financial reconciliation

Reconciliation is one of the most time-consuming activities in the financial close. The agent that matches transactions and prepares entries changes the economics of the close.

The workflow

1. The agent reads the bank statement and the ERP sub-ledger for the period.
2. The agent matches transactions across the three sources by amount, date, counterparty and reference.
3. The agent identifies breaks: unmatched in the bank, unmatched in the ERP, amount mismatches, date mismatches.
4. The agent investigates each break against the source documents: invoices, payments, journal entries.
5. The agent prepares a reconciliation entry for each break, with the source documents cited.
6. The agent routes the entries to the controller for approval. The agent never posts a reconciliation entry without human approval.

What this looks like in production

The agent operates inside the existing reconciliation process. The agent does not replace the controller; the agent prepares the entries and the controller approves.

The agent’s matching logic is configurable to the entity’s reconciliation policy: tolerance for timing differences, treatment of inter-company transactions, handling of foreign currency.

The audit trail captures every match attempt, every break investigation, and every reconciliation entry. The audit trail is available to internal audit and external auditors on demand.

What good looks like

• Reconciliation cycle compressed from days to hours.
• Reconciliation accuracy maintained or improved, measured against human-reviewed samples.
• Controller time shifted from data assembly to exception investigation.
• Audit trail available for every reconciliation entry.