Tool
A month of reconciliation, end to end
How many settlements come in a month, how many minutes each one takes, what an hour of the person reconciling costs, what share ends with an unexplained difference and what finding it costs. Below, the same month with an agent: where it goes, what it does at each step and what stays with a person.
A month of reconciliation, end to end
- the agent does it
- a person does it
- always a person
the steps of the close
- Download the month's three filesProcessor
Logs into each portal, downloads settlement and statement, exports receipts and leaves them in the same format every month.
- Match the three sourcesERP
Pairs receipt, settlement and statement by authorization number and date, and closes everything that reconciles on its own.
- Classify each differenceERP
Places each difference in one of the five known causes (fee, installments, chargeback, withholding, date) and attaches the evidence behind that classification.
- Find the document that explains itReceipts
Goes and fetches the original receipt, the credit note or the bank movement, instead of somebody hunting for it by hand.
- Propose the journal entryERP
Leaves the entry built against the right account, ready for somebody to approve.
- Draft the dispute to the processorProcessor
Writes the dispute with the transaction detail and the evidence attached, which is what does not get done today for lack of time.
- Accept, dispute or adjustERP
A person decides, but on differences already explained and with the dispute already written. It stops being a project and becomes a yes or a no.
Today that is 70 hours a month and 12 differences closed badly. Between the time and the corrections, USD 1,320 a month.
With the agent holding 6 of the 6 steps, 4 hours and USD 66 are left.
The difference is USD 1,254 a month, USD 15,048 a year.
And 36% of that difference is not time: it is the badly closed differences that stop reaching the balance.
Of what a person still does, the heaviest step is: Accept, dispute or adjust.
You set all five numbers. How the minutes split across steps is ours, taken from how it gets done by hand. The modelling assumption, worth arguing with: an error born of matching by hand falls in the same proportion as that matching stops being manual.
This object is the interactive half of an article: Card reconciliation: three documents, four screens and a close that doesn't wait