[leejo]

I'm head of processing development at PayProp[^1] where we've been automatically reconciling rental payments for two decades using the techniques described in the article - we just don't call it an AI or a LLM. Our tech saves letting agents huge amounts of time.

We look at the data we have and if it's sufficient we can "automatically" reconcile it - i.e. suggest a match with 100% certainty that the user(s) can then confirm. Otherwise we make an informed suggestions based on all of the likely data from the transaction(s) and sometimes the suggestions are a list of possible matches.

IME the biggest problems in recon are the edge cases around failures in the banking system or the flow that are very difficult to code around and require manual intervention:

* failures of payments X days after they have been reconciled, now you have to pull things apart again * bank reverses transactions but then puts them back and this appears in their intra day statements (MT942 files for example) but doesn't show on their online portals, leading to "duplicates" in one system that aren't really * statement and reference data is incomplete or just wrong (who knew that free text fields can be problematic?) * amounts simply don't match because you invoiced for X and were paid Y - payments are split up to get around constraints, amounts are rounded up, etc.

We deal with these every single day, and we are automating what we can - but you're always going to need a human to confirm the final step in these cases. Perhaps an LLM can improve suggestions, but when the data is just wrong or missing then I'm not so sure.

[^1]: https://us.payprop.com/

[3abiton]

I'm confuses, reconcialiation is also used in Bayesian statistics. Is it the same context?

[gnat]

Reconciliation in finance is taking your records of sales and matching them to your bank records. This identifies sales that didn't result in bank deposits, bank deposits that didn't come from sales, situations where you were paid too much, and situations where you were paid too little. These all happen, disturbingly frequently, so reconciliation is a necessary admin burden in businesses. It's not a critical differentiator for retailers so it's ripe for automation.

Similarly, matching invoices to purchase orders and authorising payments. This catches fraud and avoids paying for goods you didn't receive ... but it's another necessary evil rather than a value-adding differentiator for the business. So companies exist to take your PDF invoices and your ERP's "we recorded that we got x, y, z" and match them up and authorise payment for unexceptional invoices (we wanted 5, you said you sent 5, we said we got 5, let's pay you for 5).