Recon Radar

Reconciliation is scheduled work applied to unscheduled problems. Bank, clearing, intercompany and subledger accounts are reconciled on a cadence — usually monthly, sometimes weekly for the accounts that have burned someone before — and the breaks they find were created days or weeks earlier. A duplicated payment run, a receipt applied to the wrong customer, an intercompany journal posted on one side only: each is cheap to fix on the day it happens and expensive to untangle after three weeks of activity have settled on top of it.

The cadence exists because matching is manual. Someone exports a statement, pulls a ledger extract, matches what matches, and investigates the residue. That work is proportional to volume, so as transaction volume grows the reconciliation either falls behind or absorbs more of the close window — and the close window is the one thing that cannot grow. Teams respond by reconciling the risky accounts properly and giving the rest a glance, which is a reasonable triage and also exactly how a material break survives to year-end.

The deeper issue is that nothing watches the gap between systems in between reconciliations. The ledger and the source are only known to agree at the moment somebody checks. Between those moments, the organisation is operating on the assumption that they still do, and the first signal to the contrary is usually an auditor, a bank, or a counterparty asking a question.