Assisted Bank Reconciliation
Speed up bank reconciliation with automatic suggestions and anomaly detection.
At month end, the accountant compares a bank statement running to several hundred lines against the general ledger: a single bulk transfer from the bank matches twelve separate customer payments, a direct debit carries a generic label, bank charges appear with no warning. Matching the obvious lines takes no time at all; it is the ambiguous ones that absorb the day.
Fasfox builds systems that propose likely matches along with a confidence level, leaving the accountant to arbitrate the correspondences an algorithm cannot resolve on its own.
The multi-hundred-line statement at month end
The general ledger and the bank statement do not speak the same language: the bank groups operations that are recorded individually in the accounts, labels are truncated or generic, and value dates never line up exactly with posting dates. The accountant closing the month spends most of the time working out why two lines that should correspond do not line up at first glance.
Automation handles the obvious well, the ambiguous badly
A reconciliation engine handles one-to-one matches well. It struggles with grouped operations, unexpected bank charges, and export formats that change from one bank to another without notice. A pilot run on a single, single-currency account hides this difficulty; it surfaces as soon as a second entity or a second bank is added.
A stable export format, explicit matching rules
The project assumes a bank export in a consistent format and a chart of accounts that keeps the same logic month to month. More importantly, it assumes the accountant is willing to spell out the rules applied without thinking, what date gap is acceptable, which charges get matched automatically. Without that, no system can reproduce a judgement that stays implicit.
Below the confidence threshold, someone decides
The system proposes a match with a confidence level and only auto-validates what clears the threshold agreed with finance. Ambiguous, grouped or unusual correspondences stay on screen for arbitration, and the accountant signs off the close before it is finalised. Each manual arbitration also refines the matching rules used the following month, gradually narrowing the share of cases that still need a human eye. The threshold itself is set jointly with finance, and revisited whenever the pattern of transactions changes.