all work
automationfintech2024
Nightly reconciliation that replaced a spreadsheet and a prayer.
A finance team closed each day by hand-matching payments across three systems in a spreadsheet. It was slow, and the errors were expensive. We turned the whole thing into a job that runs itself and flags only what needs a human.
the challenge
Three systems disagreed about what had been paid, and reconciling them was a nightly manual chore that took hours and still let mistakes through. Every discrepancy found late cost real money and real trust.
what we did
- 01Mapped the process exactly as the team ran it, including the informal rules that lived only in one person’s head.
- 02Built an event-driven job that pulls from all three sources and matches on a set of rules we could explain.
- 03Sent only the genuine exceptions to a review queue, with the evidence attached, instead of dumping everything.
- 04Added alerting so a failed or partial run is caught immediately rather than discovered the next morning.
the outcome
- The nightly close went from [METRIC] hours of manual work to a job that finishes on its own.
- Unmatched items fell by [METRIC] once the rules were explicit and testable.
- The team spends its time on the [METRIC] cases that are genuinely ambiguous.
Bracketed values are placeholders until this study is cleared to publish.