Reconciliation work grows with volume, not with how much was wrong. A month where everything matched takes about as long as a month with three real breaks, because the only way to know the first was clean is to work through it line by line.
Where the hours go
Most of the time goes on matching that is obvious once seen: the same payment on both sides, with the supplier’s name entered differently. Then on movements between accounts. A transfer from the current account to the card account is one movement of money and two ledger lines, and if both ends are coded as costs the spending is counted twice while everything still balances. See transfers recorded as costs. And then on timing: a payment issued on the last day of the month and cleared two days later looks like a break and is not one.
What we prepare
We work through the matching and send back the bank lines and ledger lines side by side, with suggested matches, transfers paired, timing items marked and a list of everything left unmatched. The unmatched list adds up to the difference, so you can see that nothing was forced to balance. Our note on where reconciliation hours go breaks the time down further.
A difference of exactly double
When a credit is read as a debit, the difference moves by twice the item. A difference of exactly double points straight at the row, which is why we test for it first, and why we take each line’s direction from how the balance moves, not from the column a figure was printed in. See a difference exactly twice the error.
Where the judgement stays
With you. We match and list. What a break means, whether an adjustment is right and when the reconciliation is signed are decisions for the person who carries them. Nothing we produce writes to a ledger: an adjustment applied automatically looks, a month later, exactly like the error it was meant to fix.