AI agents · finance

The Reconciliation Agent

It runs every morning rather than at month end, matches what it is certain about, proposes what it is not, and refuses to guess at the rest. The refusal is the feature — a high match rate and a growing suspense balance are the same number reported twice.

bank feedmatched ledger itemACH CREDIT NORTHWIND 4820$48,200.00exactINV-10442DEP 0819 BATCH 77$31,180.00splitINV-10455 + INV-10460SQ *FULTON SYS$8,940.00fuzzyINV-10471WIRE IN REF 9920134$126,000.00unmatched → exception queueNo candidate — held for a personexact and split match automatically · fuzzy proposes and waits · unmatched never guesses
Runs dailyNever posts to suspenseRead-only to start

What it does

Six jobs, end to end.

Each of these is work a person does today. The agent does them in sequence and stops at the first thing it is not confident about.

Pull every feed

Operating, payroll, savings, and card accounts across entities, via Plaid, Finicity, direct connections, or statement import where no feed exists.

Match three ways

Exact on amount and reference, split where one deposit covers several items, and fuzzy where a memo needs interpreting. Only the first two post.

Queue the rest

Anything without a confident candidate is held with the reason stated. An unexplained wire waits for a person instead of landing in an account nobody revisits.

Explain the break

When a balance does not agree, it resolves the difference to specific transactions rather than reporting a variance for someone else to investigate.

Prepare day one

By the time the close starts, cash is already reconciled and the exceptions are a short list with owners attached.

Handle currency

Foreign-currency accounts revalued with realised and unrealised gain and loss posted separately rather than netted into one line.

Authority

Where this agent sits, and who decides.

Level 1 · start

Propose every match

Everything held for review. Useful for the first fortnight while your team calibrates what the agent is confident about and why.

Level 2 · normal

Post exact and split

The steady state for most customers. Unambiguous matches post automatically; fuzzy matches still wait for a person.

Never

Post to suspense

There is no configuration that lets it code an unmatched item to a holding account. An unexplained transaction remains an open question until a person closes it.

Optimising for match rate is the trap

Reconciliation tools are sold on match rate because it is the number that demos well. The way you raise it is to lower the confidence threshold, and the way that shows up in a real business is a suspense or ask-my-accountant balance that grows quietly for years.

We find that balance in nearly every QuickBooks file we convert. It is usually several thousand dollars, several years old, and nobody can reconstruct what is in it. It exists because at some point a system, or a person under deadline, preferred a coded transaction to an open question.

Every unexplained transaction that gets coded rather than queued is a decision to make the close look finished at the expense of it being finished.

Why daily beats monthly by more than you would expect

The obvious benefit is that close day one is already done. The larger one is that a break found on the day it happens is a two-minute question to someone who remembers the transaction, and the same break found five weeks later is a forty-minute archaeology exercise.

The second-order effect is that cash position becomes a number that exists rather than one someone assembles. For a business managing to a covenant or a short runway, that is worth more than the reconciliation itself.

What the exception queue is for

The queue is not a failure list. It is the agent telling you precisely where it needs a human, with the reason attached — no candidate, several equally good candidates, an amount that does not correspond to any open item, a memo it cannot parse. Its size is a metric we report rather than hide, because a queue that is always empty means the thresholds are too loose.

Questions

What people ask first.

What counts as an exact match?
Amount, date proximity, and a reference that ties to a specific open item — an invoice number, a check number, or a payment reference. Anything requiring interpretation is fuzzy by definition and waits.
How large is the exception queue in practice?
For a business with a few hundred monthly transactions, typically five to fifteen items a week in the first month, falling to a handful as it learns your counterparties and memo formats.
Can it reconcile credit cards?
Yes, including Ramp, Brex, and Amex feeds, matched against expense reports and receipts as well as against the ledger.
Does it work before we move our ledger?
Yes, and this is the most common starting point. It reconciles against your existing accounting system read-only.
What if a bank has no feed?
Statement import with identical matching logic. We identify which of your accounts fall into that category during the assessment rather than in week three.

Find out what is not reconciling.

One month, read-only, every break itemised to the transaction that caused it.