Daily reconciliation, from a three-day scramble to a morning report
A grocery chain losing margin to unreconciled outlet settlements moved from a three-day manual close to a nightly automated match, with exceptions surfaced before anyone opened a spreadsheet.
A regional grocery chain, 40+ outlets · First outcome in 6 weeks
Composite. This describes a pattern we see repeatedly rather than a single client, and the figures are illustrative. No client is named without written consent.
Where it started.
Every engagement begins from a written problem statement rather than a role description. This was theirs.
- 01Settlements from payment providers, outlet tills and the ledger were matched by hand, in spreadsheets, by one person.
- 02Discrepancies surfaced weeks later, by which point the outlet staff who could explain them had moved on.
- 03Nobody could say what leakage actually cost, only that it existed.
In order, and why that order.
Fix the definition before the tooling
The first week produced no automation at all. It produced an agreed definition of a matched transaction, and a written list of the six ways a match legitimately fails.
Automate the match, not the judgement
A nightly reconciliation agent matched ledger entries to settlements and pushed only the exceptions to a queue. Exceptions still went to a human — the point was that there were now dozens rather than thousands.
Put an owner on the exception queue
A reconciliation analyst worked the queue daily with a target of clearing it before the morning report. The pod lead owned the number in the weekly review.
Report the cost, not the activity
The monthly pack stopped reporting how many transactions were reconciled and started reporting what unreconciled value was outstanding, by outlet and by age.
We did not know what it was costing us. That was the actual problem — not the reconciliation.
Finance lead, retail group
- →Reconciliation runs nightly and finishes before the finance team arrives.
- →Leakage is now a number with an owner and an ageing profile, rather than a suspicion.
- →The analyst who spent a full week per month matching rows moved onto margin analysis.
Finance Operations Pod
Finance operations breaks quietly: a reconciliation that takes three days, a close that lands mid-month, cash visibility that arrives too late to act on. The Finance Operations Pod puts a senior operator on the process and an AI layer on the repetitive matching underneath it.
Different industry, same shape.
Signups were fine. Activation was the business problem.
A SaaS team optimising the top of the funnel discovered the drop-off was three steps in. Instrumenting activation changed what the roadmap was for.
The Monday report that took until Wednesday
Plant reporting assembled by hand each week arrived too late to act on. Replacing it returned two days of decision time and a day and a half of analyst effort.
Start with one problem. Not a hiring plan.
A short sprint tells you more about the work than three rounds of interviews.