Reconciliation Has Outgrown the Close – Why Modern Finance Teams Are Shifting Reconciliation Upstream

For most of my career, reconciliation was treated as a month-end accounting activity. If the numbers tied and the auditors signed off, we moved on.

That model worked when finance systems were simpler, and business moved slower. But modern finance teams operate in a very different reality that includes:

• Multiple ERPs after acquisitions
  
• Separate billing, usage, and revenue systems
  
• Dozens of bank and payment processor feeds
  
• Spreadsheets and PDFs that never quite disappear
  
• Data warehouses powering FP&A, tax, and executive reporting

In these circumstances, reconciliation is no longer quite as simple as it used to be. It has been forced to expand, and it now solves two distinct problems — one inside the close and one upstream of it.

Problem #1: Running and Governing the Close

Modern financial close platforms brought discipline to a process that used to be manual and fragmented. They help finance teams manage checklists and dependencies, perform account reconciliations, automate transaction matching for finance-led use cases, route reviews and approvals, and maintain audit trails and evidence.

For many teams, the close platform is now the system of record for accountability and control. That foundation reduces noise and keeps the organization honest. It also helps explain why “faster close” became such a big category over the last decade.

The issue is that the close is no longer where reconciliation begins.

Problem #2: Making the Data Behind the Close Trustworthy

Most reconciliation issues don’t originate in accounting. They originate in the data. You can run a clean close and still carry risk because the close platform is reconciling what accounting received — not necessarily what the business did.

A few examples show up repeatedly.

Example 1: Revenue Completeness (ERP – Billing – CRM)

The general ledger revenue balance ties. Everyone relaxes.

Then someone asks a simple question: “Is revenue correct by customer, contract, or product?”

That’s where the gaps appear:

• Billing missed usage records
  
• CRM contracts don’t align with billing schedules
  
• Customer attribution is inconsistent across systems

The account reconciles. The story doesn’t. 

This is not a close checklist problem. It is a cross-system data reconciliation problem.

Example 2: Cash and Settlements (Bank – PSPs – ERP)

Cash balances match at month-end.

But settlement timing differs by processor. Fees are applied inconsistently. Chargebacks lag reporting. 

Finance spends days explaining timing differences — often outside the ERP, in spreadsheets.

Again, the issue isn’t the close workflow. It’s reconciling transactions across systems with different clocks.

Example 3: Post-M&A Complexity (ERP – ERP – Data Warehouse)

After an acquisition:

• Charts of accounts differ
  
• Entities roll up differently
  
• Historical data lives in multiple ERPs
  
• Definitions drift between the acquired business and the parent company
  

Totals tie at a high level, but the details match up. That is where teams lose time and confidence.

Finance needs reconciliation logic that spans systems, entities, and time — not only accounts.

Example 4: Documents That Still Matter

Automation doesn’t change the fact that finance still depends on source documents like:

• Bank statements
  
• Invoices
  
• Contracts and amendments
  
• Statements of work
  
• Tax forms and supporting schedules

Close platforms do a strong job of tying reconciliations to supporting evidence.

Increasingly, though, teams also need to extract data from these (often unstructured) documents, reconcile what’s inside them to system records, and maintain lineage for audit and compliance.

That is a data problem, not a documentation problem.

The Close Is Getting Longer and More Challenging

Here’s a reality check: Cross-industry benchmarks show a median of 6 days to complete monthly consolidated financial statements. The reality of annual close is even more sobering, taking a median of 18 days.

In other words, even with years of investment in close discipline, a lot of organizations still spend meaningful time closing and reconciling, because the surface area for mismatches keeps expanding.

The business now runs through more systems, more feeds, more formats, and more exceptions. Finance is expected to deliver answers with speed and proof, not only totals that tie.

When finance teams tell me the close is getting harder, they’re rarely describing the checklist. They’re describing the conversations around it: why revenue is right in total but wrong in detail, why cash is ‘explained’ but still not clean, why acquisitions make rollups look fine until you go one layer down.

Those aren’t close problems. They’re upstream data problems that show up at the close because that’s where finance is forced to reconcile reality.

The Modern Reconciliation Stack

The examples above all point to the same issue: There’s a gap in the way most teams think about reconciliation.

Financial close platforms are excellent at reconciling what accounting reports. But they sit downstream of the work that actually determines whether those numbers are true — reconciling the business reality across billing, CRM, banks, payment processors, multiple ERPs, warehouses, and the documents that still carry key terms and evidence.

To get real clarity in outcomes, finance needs a reconciliation layer before data is fed into the close platform. That is the missing layer in the modern reconciliation stack.

We built Savant for that gap.

This data reconciliation layer sits upstream of the close. It doesn’t replace governance. It changes where governance starts.

Savant runs reconciliations across systems, not just within a ledger. We do multi-dimensional checks. We extract evidence from unstructured data sources like PDFs, scans, and photos of invoices, and convert it into structured, machine-readable data. We maintain lineage so teams can answer “where did this number come from?” without hand-built trails. And we support continuous monitoring so that issues surface when they appear, not weeks later during close.

Finance teams don’t need another place for work to pile up. They need the reconciliation logic to run earlier, with the controls intact.

The Shift I’m Seeing in Finance Teams

If you’re running finance at scale, you’ve felt the pressure building for years. It shows up as late nights, variance explanation decks, and brittle spreadsheets that only one person understands.

The question finance leaders asked used to be, “how do we reconcile faster during the close?”

These days, it’s increasingly becoming, “how do we stop reconciliation issues from showing up at the close at all?”

Achieving the vision is doable, but it requires a three-pronged change:

• From reactive to proactive: detect drift early, before it compounds
• From month-end to continuous: operate reconciliation as a continuous process
• From account-centric to data-centric: reconcile the business logic, not just balances

Savant is made to enable this shift.

The outcome shows up as trust. Trust in the close. Trust in the reporting. Trust that the numbers are defensible when someone asks the next question.

If reconciliation has outgrown your close, and you’re pushing it upstream this year, book a demo below to see how Savant approaches the modern reconciliation stack in practice.