Capsule 009: Reconciliation (AR/AP at Scale)

A live bank feed and a weekly glance reconciles one or two accounts perfectly well. It stops working the moment your business runs real volume — two hundred transactions a week instead of twenty — or more than one legal entity. At that point, three things start going wrong at once: ordinary timing delays between a sale and its settlement pile up faster than you can track by eye, payments that combine two invoices or split one across instalments stop matching cleanly, and a card processor’s single batched payout — one payment standing in for forty-five separate sales — refuses to match against anything unless you know to unbundle it first.

This Capsule builds the systematic matching layer that founder-level reconciliation was never designed to handle. You get a consolidated ledger across every account and entity you hold, matching rules with real tolerance settings instead of exact-match guesswork, an exception log for anything that doesn’t clear automatically, and an aging dashboard with a genuine escalation rule — because a variance caught within the week is routine, and the same variance caught three months later is a real problem.

By the end you’re running reconciliation as a weekly rhythm at whatever scale your business actually operates at, with a materiality threshold doing the work of deciding what needs chasing today and what can safely wait for a monthly clean-up. The worked example throughout: a two-entity, four-account business reconciling 220 transactions a week at a 93% automatic match rate, with a clear rule for the handful that don’t.