Your bank reconciliation takes too long, and someone suggests a better matching engine. It is a fair suggestion. It also aims at the wrong step.
Matching is usually the part that already moves. The slow part is everything that has to happen before the match and after it. Make matching ten times faster and you save minutes in a process that loses its days somewhere else.
Touch time and elapsed time
Two clocks run on every reconciliation. Touch time is the work someone actually does: reading a statement, comparing lines, writing a note. Elapsed time is the calendar time between the start and the finish.
The gap between them is waiting. A statement sits in an inbox. A question sits with someone who is on a call. A reply sits in a thread nobody has reopened.
Most improvement effort goes to touch time because it is visible. You can watch an accountant match lines. You cannot watch a flagged item wait two days for an answer, so it never appears on anyone's list of problems.
Where the weeks go
Take an example company with bank accounts in three regions. Nothing here is a real client, just a shape multi-region teams will recognize.
- Each bank sends statements in its own format, and someone has to ask for them or download them.
- The matching run flags a handful of items nobody on the central team can explain.
- You email the local controller to ask what they are. They are closing their own books and answer when they can.
- The answer is partial, so you ask again.
- Once the item is understood, someone posts the adjustment.
- Each region's result is rolled into one consolidated file, which waits for the slowest region.
Count the steps that need a person to think. Matching is one of them. Most of the others need a person to wait, chase or copy.
Fix the process around the match
Speeding up the match is the smallest lever. Three changes around it do more.
Let statements arrive on a feed. When a bank sends data on a schedule, nobody asks for it and nobody reformats it. This step runs on a bank connection and an agreed format, and it removes the first wait.
Let rules match what rules can match. Exact amounts, known references and recurring items do not need a person. A rule set handles them the same way each month, and your team sees only what is left.
Send exceptions as assembled cases. An email that says "what is this item?" starts a round trip. A case that holds the item, its history with that account, the evidence found so far and a proposed next step lets the local controller answer yes, no or fix it in one reply. One question with the context attached gets one answer.
The people on your team then work an exception queue instead of an inbox. Each exception arrives ready to decide. The judgment stays with them, and the hunting happens before they see it.
What this changes for the close
Day to day, your team stops asking "did the statement from every region come in?" and starts asking "which three items need a decision today?"
The regional controllers get fewer, better questions. The consolidated file stops waiting on the last region to finish its chasing, because the chasing mostly disappears.
A tool that only improves matching gives you none of this. You would have a faster step in the middle of the same queue of waits.
The objection you will hear
"We don't have time to redesign the process, we are mid-close." That is true every month, which is why the waiting never gets fixed. Nobody has spare hours while the work is stuck in the queue.
You also do not need to redesign everything at once. Start with the longest wait on your sheet. If it is chasing statements, set up the feed for one bank. If it is the reply from a local controller, build the assembled case for one account and see whether the round trips drop from several to one. Each change can show up in the next close, and your team can see the result without a new system.
Measure before you buy
You do not need a vendor to find out where your time goes. Pick one reconciliation from last month and write down, for each step:
- When the step could start.
- When someone actually started it.
- How long they worked on it.
- When it finished.
Add up the work time. Then add up the calendar time from the first statement request to the sign-off. Compare the two.
If the gap is large, you have found the real target. The first fix is whichever wait is longest on your sheet.
What to do next
Run that measurement on one account this week.
If you want a wider view, the free GAAPx Score is a self-assessment across nine finance areas, including treasury and the close. If you would like a second pair of eyes on your sheet, get in touch.