There are some characteristics that all good reconciliation software should have, regardless of your particular use case or business setup. These observations come from our years of experience dealing with financial firms of all sizes across the globe. The following features are vital to ensure you get the most from your reconciliation platform:
· Flexible ingestion: Look for a tool with the capability to ingest data in many formats. Good reconciliation software will remove the ETL layer and provide capabilities to prepare data as well as ingest it.
· Best-in-class matching: Match rates are vital. A solid reconciliation tool should have fuzzy matching and rule-based tolerances to filter out false breaks due to formatting or rounding. It should also have strong controls around these rules to ensure auditability.
· Ease of building and managing: Platforms where business users who know the data can build and modify processes will save time, money and headaches. Avoid systems that require massive change projects just to build or change a rec.
· Exception management capabilities: Ease of use is the name of the game here. No matter how good your match rates are, you’ll still have to manage exceptions. The ability to label, comment on, assign, and resolve exceptions from one screen is vital. Automated or rule-based exception management is even better.
· Reporting capabilities: The ability to feed data downstream and view status and results on a dashboard is key to oversight and identifying the trends that signal upstream problems.
· Total cost of ownership: Consider upgrade costs, maintenance costs, IT and project costs, and intangible or opportunity costs. A cloud-based solution, for example, will cost you significantly less than an on-premise deployment, while providing much greater scalability.