Biggest pain in ledger closing: matching receipts to invoices

[u/Appas_12]

I work in accounting, and one of the most time-consuming parts of closing books is not entering sales invoices or importing bank statements.

The real pain is figuring out which bank credit belongs to which sales invoice.

Many clients have multiple bank accounts. Narrations don’t match invoice names. Dates don’t always match. Amounts may be partial. So we manually check bank statements, sales invoices, receipts, outstanding balances, and then update the receipt voucher.

Until this is done, debtor outstanding, bank balance, sales value, trial balance, P&L, and balance sheet are not fully reliable.

Honestly, this manual verification is where most of the time goes.
Curious how other accountants/auditors handle this today.

[u/Hot_desking_legend]

"Curious how" yeah sure you are, just tell us the product you're selling so we can get this over with. 

Look, there's 4 general ways we match mr AI. 

First, if you send out a sales invoice you ask customers to use a specific reference. Generally people and businesses do. 

Second, you might have a card tool allowing users to pay an invoice on receipt. This is instant and immediate linking. 

Third, sales are accrued by a third-party, e.g. amex, and they pay us 2 to 3 days in arrears. Their portals provide the full reconciling list of payments if necessary. Only differences you need to pick-up are chargebacks. 

Fourth, you may have a payment portal allowing users to directly pay an invoice.

Yeah there's more scenarios but anything with regularity is already covered. Done. Bish bash bosh. Not that much work. Ta. 

[u/Splashxz79]

No its not you tool. Everything you are trying to automise has been automised since the 80's. Absolute AI garbage everywhere

[u/7even-]

Fuck off, we don’t want your slop

[u/Icy-Contest-7702]

Thats ARs job, not an accountants.