// Automate the Busywork
A Reconciliation Engine That Cleaned Years of Books to Zero Variance
A multi-entity business years behind on its books
The story in briefYears of books were behind, spread across multiple accounts, and outsourced bookkeeping was an open-ended monthly cost. We built software that reads every statement — even scanned ones — reconciles multi-year transactions across seven accounts to zero variance, and posts the corrections. The audit report balances.
The situation
The books were years behind across bank, card, and loan accounts. The options were a bookkeeper spending months on manual cleanup, or an outsourced service billing every month with no finish line in sight.
Why the usual options fell short
Manual reconciliation is slow, error-prone, and never ends. Industry data pegs manual document handling at roughly $15 per document and manual data entry at about a quarter of the workday, with error rates that automation cuts by up to 88%. Outsourced bookkeeping converts all of that into a permanent monthly line item. Neither approach turns the data into insight — they just process it, again, every month.
What we built
A reconciliation engine. It ingests statements in any format — native PDFs and scanned images via OCR — normalizes the transactions, and reconciles them across all seven accounts against the cloud accounting platform. It flags missing periods, duplicate entries, and inter-account transfers, posts the correcting journal entries, and emits a zero-variance report that proves the books balance.
The part they didn’t expect
Once the data was clean and finally readable, patterns surfaced that years of manual bookkeeping had walked straight past. Reviews run off that same clean data exposed money leaking in places the monthly invoice never showed — the cleanup didn’t just catch the books up, it started paying for itself. (That thread is its own story: see the Found Money work.)
The payoff
- Multiple years reconciled to zero variance, provable on an audit report.
- Open-ended monthly bookkeeping replaced by software the business owns.
- Statements in any format — scanned, PDF, multiple institutions — handled without manual re-keying.
- Automation of this kind typically returns its cost in months, not years; the industry median is roughly 320% over three years.
// is this you?
If this sounds like a problem you recognize — even if you never pictured building your own answer to it — that is usually the sign. Describe your version and a senior engineer will tell you plainly whether it is the kind of thing we build.
Start a project// common questions
Questions about this kind of build
Can it read scanned or PDF statements?
Yes. The engine handles native PDFs and scanned images through OCR, normalizes the transactions, and reconciles them regardless of how the statement arrived.
Does this replace our accountant?
No. It hands your accountant clean, reconciled, audit-ready data instead of a shoebox — so their time goes to judgment, not data entry.
What accounting platform does it work with?
It targets the major cloud accounting platforms via their APIs. We confirm the exact fit during discovery before any build.
// next step
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