If at the end of every month someone on your team sits down with a bank statement and a spreadsheet to match transaction by transaction, this article is for you. Bank reconciliation (checking that what the bank says matches what your accounting says) is one of those tasks nobody enjoys and yet has to be done no matter what. The good news is that it can be almost entirely automated.
What it is and why it’s so painful
Reconciling means pairing each bank entry with its corresponding invoice, receipt or payment. It sounds simple, but in practice the usual headaches show up:
- A customer pays three invoices in a single transfer.
- The bank’s description bears no resemblance to the supplier’s name.
- There are fees, refunds and direct debits that nobody had recorded.
- A payment gateway settlement arrives with its commission already deducted.
Doing it by hand means opening several screens, comparing amounts and dates, and praying the final balance adds up. In an SME with hundreds of transactions a month, that’s hours lost and, worse still, errors that get carried forward.
How automatic reconciliation works
The idea is for the computer to do the repetitive work while the person only reviews the exceptions. The process, simplified, goes like this:
- The bank transactions come in automatically, through a standardised file (the Norma 43 format, which almost all Spanish banks offer) or via a secure connection.
- The system looks for matches by comparing amount, date and descriptions against the invoices and payments already recorded.
- It pairs the obvious ones with no human intervention: the €1,210 transfer that matches exactly with invoice number such-and-such.
- It flags the doubts for a person to decide. Only what genuinely requires judgement gets reviewed.
The key isn’t for the machine to get it right 100% of the time, but for it to resolve the boring 80 or 90% so your team can spend its time on what takes brainpower.
Over time, what’s more, the rules get sharper: if you always assign transactions with the description “LIQUID. TPV” to the fees account, the system learns that pattern and stops asking.
A realistic example
Imagine a distributor with around 400 bank transactions a month. Today, one person spends two full mornings balancing the bank before closing the month. With a well-built automated flow, most of the entries pair themselves in a matter of minutes when the file is imported, and that person moves on to reviewing only the forty or fifty real exceptions. The task stops being a full day’s work and becomes a quick review.
It’s not magic: it’s getting the mechanical part out of the way so human work concentrates where it adds value.
Open-source software and your data on your server
At Bravo IA we build this kind of automation with open-source software, usually on top of management tools that many SMEs already use or can adopt without paying per-user licences. This matters for two reasons:
- No lock-in. You’re not tied to a provider who raises the price every year. If you want to switch tomorrow, the system and the data are yours.
- Your data lives on your server. Bank statements and accounting are sensitive information. There’s no reason for them to end up in someone else’s cloud you have no control over.
And everything connects to your bank through the standard files your institution already provides, with no need to change banks or accountants.
Where to start
There’s no need to transform all of your accounting at once. The usual approach is to start with one bank account, build the first matching rules and measure how much time is saved at the first close. From there you expand to the rest of the accounts and cases.
If you recognise yourself in that “losing mornings balancing the bank” situation, at Bravo IA we offer a free audit: we review how you reconcile today and tell you frankly which part can be automated and what return you can expect, no strings attached. Sometimes the savings show up in the very first month.