[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).