Automate Monthly Financial Reconciliation for AP/AR

Many SMBs start with QuickBooks Online or Xero for accounting. Their built-in bank feeds work for simple one-to-one matching, but they fail with common AP/AR complexity. For example, a single ACH deposit from a client might cover 15 different invoices. QBO’s matching tool will suggest random one-to-one pairings, forcing a bookkeeper to manually find and check off all 15 correct invoices from a long list, a process that is both slow and prone to error.

In practice, this creates tedious, high-stakes manual work. Consider a 25-person services firm using Bill.com for Accounts Payable. An admin receives a PDF invoice from a contractor for $5,250. They manually enter the vendor details, invoice number, date, and line items into Bill.com. The payment is sent. The bank transaction simply shows a withdrawal for $5,250 with a generic memo. The bookkeeper must then manually match the bank statement line item against the Bill.com payment record. A single typo in the initial data entry creates a mismatch that can take an hour to find during the month-end close.

The structural problem is that these off-the-shelf platforms are designed for manual workflows with rigid data models. They cannot ingest a PDF invoice and automatically create a payable with correct line-item coding. They cannot apply custom logic, such as flagging all payments to a new vendor over $1,000 for CFO review. Your team is forced to work around the software's limitations, creating manual processes that negate the tool's original purpose.

The engagement starts by mapping your exact cash-to-close cycle. Syntora audits your invoicing system (like Harvest or Stripe Invoicing), your bank accounts through Plaid, and your current accounting ledger. This discovery phase defines the precise matching logic: how to handle partial payments from clients, how to group multiple invoices under one deposit, and how to flag exceptions for review. You receive a technical specification document outlining these rules for approval before any code is written.

We built our own financial system on PostgreSQL with Plaid and Stripe, processing bank syncs in under 3 seconds. An AP/AR system for a client would follow a similar pattern, using a FastAPI service as the core. The service pulls transactions from Plaid and invoice data from your accounting software's API. A Python script using the pandas library executes the matching logic, capable of processing over 5,000 transactions per minute, while Pydantic models ensure data consistency between systems.

The delivered system runs on AWS Lambda, typically costing under $50 per month to operate. It runs the reconciliation process on a daily schedule, providing a constant, accurate view of your cash flow. Any exceptions, like a payment that does not match an invoice, are sent to a designated email address with all relevant details. You receive the full source code and a runbook, creating a system that can cut month-end close time by over 10 hours.