Banking reconciliation
Bank reconciliation matches every line on your bank statement to a corresponding entry in your accounting system. Done weekly, it catches errors early — duplicate charges, missing supplier invoices, payment fraud. Done quarterly, it becomes a multi-day forensic exercise nobody wants to do.
The manual reality
Matching bank lines to invoices and expenses is mostly pattern matching: payment amount, date proximity, supplier name fuzziness, payment reference number. Off-the-shelf tools handle ~70% of matches automatically and leave the rest for manual work. The 30% remainder is where the time goes — multi-invoice payments, partial payments, FX-rate differences, currency rounding.
The WorkAist approach
The WorkAist reconciliation agent reads your bank feed daily, matches each line against open invoices and expense entries in your accounting system, and posts the match. The matching uses both deterministic rules (amount within €0.50, date within 7 days, IBAN match) and LLM-based fuzzy matching for the harder cases (reference number contains the invoice number obfuscated, supplier renamed). Unmatched lines remain in a queue that an accountant reviews in 10-15 minutes per week.
Implementation in 5 steps
- 1Connect your bank via Plaid, Tink, or a country-specific PSD2 provider (Qonto, N26, Wise).
- 2Connect your accounting system (Xero, QuickBooks, sevDesk, Pennylane).
- 3Configure matching tolerances (amount tolerance, date window, reference-number rules).
- 4Let the agent run for a 2-week training period — every match is logged in the audit trail, even auto-accepted ones, so you can review accuracy.
- 5Switch on auto-posting and review the unmatched queue weekly.
Connectors & agents involved
FAQ
How does the agent handle multi-invoice payments?▼
When a single bank line covers multiple invoices (a supplier paid for three invoices in one transfer), the agent enumerates open invoices for that supplier and proposes the combination that matches the amount. If multiple combinations are plausible (rare), it asks for human confirmation.
What about FX differences?▼
For multi-currency accounts, the agent applies the booking-date FX rate (configurable: institutional rate, ECB reference rate, supplier-bank rate) and posts the rounding difference to a configured FX-difference account. The decision is logged.
Is this a replacement for my accountant's reconciliation review?▼
No — it's the heavy lifting that lets your accountant review reconciliations in 15 minutes instead of 5 hours. The accountant approves the agent's matches and digs into the unmatched queue, which is where the real issues live (fraud, errors, missing invoices).
Automate Banking reconciliation this month
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