If your organisation is one dealing with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of lines of reconciliation data every day, then it’s time to look for a new solution to help manage this.
When evaluating what’s right for your business, looking for the basics such as integration, scalability, compatibility, and support are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s also important to evaluate tools based on their ability to help you get the most out of your data and processes.
Here, we’ll walk through what to look for in an automated reconciliation tool and why it’s important for your business.
Before automation can work effectively, your data needs to speak the same language.
Data often comes from multiple sources, each in its own format and naming convention. Standardising these – such as date, currency code, and acronyms – will ensure data aligns correctly when you reconcile documents.
The cleanliness and quality of data provided at the capture stage will impact the quality of data you get in your results. Better data means less manual management.
It’s important to tailor the solution to your business needs and ecosystems, not the other way round. When looking at possible automated reconciliation tools, consider these aspects:
Automation and AI are only as smart as the rules and data it works with.
When searching for an automated reconciliation tool, assess whether it defines clear transformation and enrichment rules to clean and prepare data. Enrich this with relevant context such as filtering for country-specific transactions or tagging data with certain identifiers. Doing so, and matching fields like IDs across datasets can significantly improve match rates.
It's important to have a tool that filters and transforms data early, so it flows through systems seamlessly and doesn’t cause downstream impact. Automated reconciliation solutions that utilise embedded AI tools (where available) to do the hard work of setting up the initial rule configurations based on headings or underlying data patterns should be high on your priority list, too. AI and automation take the tedious load off your team, so they can focus on more productive tasks.
Reconciliation doesn’t stop at matching; it includes resolution, reporting, and auditability. A good automated reconciliation tool will be able to map out where your data comes from and how it enters your systems.
Questions you should consider asking when reviewing a tool:
Next up, it’s important to evaluate what happens after reconciliation, as the process doesn’t stop there. Does the tool you’re evaluating route and assign breaks to specific users, teams, or systems? Are workflows triggered automatically?
Today, automating reconciliations in real-time should be non-negotiable if you want to comply with regulations, meet deadlines on time, and fulfil customers’ needs. Therefore, when searching for an automated reconciliation tool, consider whether it can instantly reconcile external data with internal records to detect mismatches.
Having this capability is important as it enables you to implement real-time matching logic to compare incoming data with internal records as they arrive, and be proactive with issue resolution, allowing teams to address mismatches before they cascade into risk events.
No matter how good your automated reconciliation tool or system is, there will always be some exceptions – even if it’s one for every thousand reconciliations you do. However, a good tool will be able to automatically identify discrepancies and prioritise unresolved items so your teams don’t have to.
This includes automatically flagging discrepancies that require attention, such as missing transactions, duplicate entries, or mismatched amounts, and use rule-based prioritisation to surface high-risk or high-value exceptions first, enabling faster resolution and better resource allocation.
Often overlooked, reporting is an important aspect of automated reconciliations to get right, and doing it yourself can be tricky. Working with disparate or siloed systems can make things difficult. However, deploying a tool that generates audit-ready reports for compliance and financial analysis can take that weight off your shoulders.
Look for an automated solution that can:
Selecting the right software provider isn’t just about ticking the correct capability boxes; it’s about finding a partner that understands your operational challenges and can scale with your business. Look for a provider that offers robust automation with AI capabilities, real-time data handling, and intelligent exception management.
With Xceptor, benefit from all the technical elements as well as the support from our teams.
All of this is done through a no-code interface that enables business users to quickly adapt to changing business and regulatory demands.
By combining real-time matching, automated exception handling, and audit-ready reporting, Xceptor empowers teams to reconcile faster, with greater accuracy and confidence. Its flexible rule engine and data enrichment capabilities ensure that even the most complex datasets are handled with precision.
Whether you're reconciling bank statements, trading data, or internal records, Xceptor provides the control, transparency, and scalability needed to meet today’s financial and regulatory demands.