In today’s fast-paced payments landscape, reconciliation processes are under constant pressure from real-time data demands, multi-currency transactions and escalating regulatory scrutiny. Meeting these requirements calls for advanced reconciliation tools, scalable workflows and real-time visibility.
Yet our 2025 payments reconciliation and reporting survey revealed an inconvenient truth: finance teams are still battling with spreadsheets, manual spot-checks and cobbled-together in-house systems—fighting a losing battle against growing complexity.
At first, managing reconciliation processes via spreadsheets might feel manageable, until they quietly stall your ability to grow.
But how can you tell that you’re in need of modernisation?
If any of the below signs sound familiar, it’s a flashing red light that it’s time to automate your reconciliations before today’s inefficiencies become tomorrow’s liabilities.
1) You’re spending hours preparing data
If your team spends more time getting ready to reconcile than actually reconciling, you have a problem.
Our survey found UK payments companies lose an average of three hours just gathering, cleaning and formatting data before reconciliation can even start.
Multiply that by every reconciliation cycle, and the opportunity cost is staggering.
Automated reconciliation software cuts straight through this inefficiency. It standardises data from multiple sources instantly, enriches transactions with metadata, flags anomalies in real time and frees your team to do actual problem-solving rather than endless data wrangling.
It also slashes the manual errors that sneak in during data staging, setting you up for cleaner, faster reconciliations from the start.
2. You’re missing reporting deadlines (and paying for it)
82% of businesses surveyed admitted to frequently struggling with reporting deadlines, whether for regulatory reports, internal audits or Mastercard and Visa submissions. As regulators place the payments industry under greater scrutiny, late reports represent a material compliance and reputational risk.
A modern reconciliation tool delivers far more than high-volume transaction matching—it’s your end-to-end reporting engine, generating precise outputs with a single click. With pre-formatted regulatory templates, audit-ready transaction histories and exception alerts, businesses can meet every reporting deadline with confidence and reduce the risk of costly penalties.
3. You’re seeing a rise in financial discrepancies and errors
No business surveyed reported having an error-free reconciliation process. In fact, as transaction complexity grows, outdated and fragmented workflows become the root cause of financial discrepancies.
Human error and poor system integration account for 44% of all reconciliation errors. Without early detection, these errors snowball into major downstream issues, like cash flow challenges, weakened financial reporting integrity and even barriers to attracting investment.
With the right automated platform, discrepancies are caught early through dynamic matching logic, intelligent exception handling and real-time variance tracking, protecting both your bottom line and your credibility.
The result? Stronger controls, higher quality data and reduced exposure to regulatory risk.
4. You can’t keep up with transaction volumes
As your business scales, so do your reconciliation challenges.
Whether it’s cross-border payments, multiple payment channels or high-frequency transaction environments, manual methods simply can’t keep pace.
In our survey, nearly half (45%) of respondents pointed to cross-currency transactions and high data volumes as significant bottlenecks in the reconciliation process. Without scalable automation, teams fall into endless cycles of managing exceptions, patching fragmented systems and scrambling to meet reporting deadlines.
Automated reconciliation solutions are designed to scale with you. They handle large, fragmented data sets across multiple acquirers, processors, card schemes and currencies. They also automate settlement matching, FX reconciliations and bank validations at scale, ensuring that your growth doesn’t mean sacrificing control or compliance.
5. Your back-office is focused on firefighting, not strategy
When reconciliation becomes a daily grind just to keep up, it robs your finance and operations teams of the chance to add real strategic value. Instead of analysing trends, optimising processes or contributing to business growth, they’re stuck manually cross-checking transactions or chasing down discrepancies.
With end-to-end automation, you empower your team to shift from reactive to proactive. Instead of fighting fires, they can surface actionable insights from your transaction data, identify fraud patterns faster and support strategic decision-making while reconciliation processes tick along in the background.
Final thoughts: Treat reconciliation as a strategic advantage, not just a process
If you recognised even one of these signs, it’s time to rethink your approach to reconciliation. Relying on outdated manual processes actively blocks your ability to grow, compete and comply in an increasingly complex payments landscape.
And let’s not forget: profitability in payments is volume-driven. Scalable, automated back-office operations are critical if you want to protect margins as transaction volumes rise.
If your systems can’t keep up, neither can your profitability.
Platforms like Kani’s automated reconciliation solution future-proof your finance operations with simplified workflows, iron-clad financial controls and real-time reporting—all while scaling effortlessly alongside your business.
Ready to see how Kani can take your reconciliations to the next level?
