Automated Reconciliation: How Kani Saves Time & Resources

18th July 2024

If you’re a payment company that’s still performing manual reconciliations, then you’re probably dealing with issues such as:

Your financial teams spend their days performing tedious reconciliation processes that consume excessive amounts of time and resources, preventing them from doing more important work such as investigating anomalies in reconciliations.
You’re dealing with inaccuracies and errors in your reconciliations, which leads to more work for your team and, at worst, a potential fine.
You’re looking to use a reconciliation tool but you’re finding that they are too generic and inflexible for the payments industry. For example, they can’t handle the reporting requirements for schemes (like Mastercard and Visa), nor do they integrate with the payment processors and data sources you need.

In this article, we’ll discuss how automated reconciliation software eliminates challenges associated with manual reconciliation via automated matching, data management and game-changing accuracy. We’ll also show you how Kani’s reconciliation software is specifically optimised for the operational needs of payment companies.

We’ll cover:

Note: Looking for an automated reconciliation solution designed by payments experts for payments professionals? Try a demo of Kani

Four ways automation makes reconciliations faster, easier and more reliable

Manual reconciliation is time-consuming and error-prone. Having to deal with different spreadsheets using different formats leads to significant complexity. For example, simply saving a spreadsheet in the old XLS format rather than the updated XLSX format can result in corrupted datasets that are difficult to clean up.

Even if everything goes smoothly, your financial teams still spend hours every day combing through transaction data to match financial records and identify variances — leaving them with less time to investigate issues as they struggle to meet financial reporting deadlines.

So what are the best use cases for automation? Here are some examples of how automated reconciliation can turbocharge your operations.

Automatically standardise financial services data from multiple payment processing sources (including processors, card issuers and banks) so they’re all in the same format and easy to read.
Automatically generate card scheme reports (such as QMR and GOC reports) using pre-configured report templates — making it easier to maintain payment compliance, avoid fines and prepare for financial audits.
Automatically publish, sign-off and send reports to the appropriate parties and providers, such as regulators, clients or other departments in your company.
Configure automatic alerts for anomalies and breaks, so you don’t have to check your reconciliations every day.

Our founder and CEO, Aaron Holmes, dealt with the time-drains of manual reconciliations first-hand. He found that most account reconciliation tools weren’t optimised to handle the specific challenges of the payments industry — such as automating QMR and GOC reports, maintaining a detailed audit of reconciliations and reports and managing large transaction volumes efficiently.

This led him to create Kani, an advanced reconciliation and reporting solution designed specifically for the payments industry. Our clients use Kani to make reconciliations faster, easier and more reliable.

Here’s how Kani saves you time and resources through automated reconciliation.

How the Kani platform works for payment companies

Kani is the only reconciliation platform built by payments experts for professionals in the payments industry, such as BIN sponsors, challenger banks, acquirers and more. We’ve reconciled billions in processed payment volume for our clients since 2018. Our award-winning SaaS solution allows you to:

Automate the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of reconciliation.
Ingest and standardise limitless data volumes from multiple data sources.
Matching transactions and reconciliation for large and complex datasets in under 30 seconds
Generate reports with pre-built report templates (including QMR, GOC and safeguarding reports).
Sign-off on reports.

Here’s how the platform works:

1. Onboard and set up product configuration

We’ll work with you during the onboarding to design your solution around specific product requirements, such as BIN ranges, program managers and processors. We store all of this information in a separate table that Kani uses for reconciliations.

The product configuration allows us to tailor Kani to your existing processes. We’ll take into account your current approaches to things like bank reconciliations, data reporting and report recipients.

If clients require unique reconciliations for each of their customers, Kani leverages the raw data and established product configurations to perform reconciliations at the client or even currency level.

2. Ingest payment data

Kani creates pipelines to securely ingest data from a variety of sources. This can occur via an FTP server or email.

Our automated platform ingests data from any source (such as processors, credit card issuers, banks, internal general ledgers or third parties) and multiple file formats (such as CSV, JSON, etc.). We integrate with more than 25 payment processors and data sources, such as Visa, Mastercard, Marqeta, Thredd and more.

And, if you’re using an internal or external data source that our solution doesn’t already support, our team can onboard that data source or configure a solution quickly.

3. Standardise your data according to specifications

Different data sources send data in different file formats and present data in unique ways (i.e., specific columns and information), which makes manual financial reconciliations even more difficult.

Once ingested, Kani automatically standarises your data according to your specifications to provide consistency across datasets and enable easier analysis and reconciliations.

To enhance analysis and comparison across datasets, Kani can:

Trim data and remove unwanted columns.
Segregate data — e.g., if the date and time are presented together, Kani separates it into two columns.
Join datasets for record matching. For example, imagine you ingested five files. If one of the files is missing a unique reference required for record matching, Kani locates it in another file and pulls in the reference.
Consolidate data from different files into one file — for example, a unique reference that is not available in one file can be located in another file and added.

However, our solution also maintains an unaltered copy of the original files for reference. This allows your team to go back and view historical data whenever necessary for auditing and verification.

4. Automatically complete reconciliations and send reports

Kani processes large volumes of transactions in seconds, streamlining reconciliation and saving your team hundreds of hours per year. Once your data is in the Kani platform, you can use it for reconciliations, reports, business intelligence and more.

Kani comes complete with a range of templated reports, such as Mastercard QMR, Visa GOC, safeguarding, settlement and transaction monitoring reports. Each report is pre-formatted, so your team doesn’t need to figure out what to include or worry about submission errors.

5. Manage your reconciliation from one dashboard

You’ll be able to view, manage and track your reconciliations all from one dashboard. The hierarchical dashboard provides a high-level view of your accounts, so you can:

See all the data from your entire portfolio in one location.
Quickly see reconciled and unreconciled accounts.
Click through on any report and drill down into the underlying data for insights into the individual transactions that make up an unreconciled transaction.

How Kani’s automated reconciliation software helps payments companies save time while remaining compliant

We designed Kani to help payments companies eliminate their most challenging reconciliation problems and turn their data into an asset. By automating reconciliation tasks specific to the payments industry (such as QMR and GOC report generation), Kani saves you time, increases the reliability of your reconciliations and transaction reporting and simplifies regulatory compliance processes.

Eliminate labour-intensive reconciliation processes to save time and money

The average payment company spends 3 hours on data preparation before the reconciliation process can begin. Kani allows your team to reclaim this time by automatically ingesting and standardising your data.

Here are a few other ways the platform helps you save time on reconciliation.

Easily drill down into your transaction data to investigate anomalies

Kani’s dashboard provides a holistic view of your accounts and reports. You can quickly see which files are reconciled and which have discrepancies for resolution.

You can click through on any report to drill down into the data. Kani converts files into user-friendly file formats that are easy to read. So, regardless of technical expertise, you can easily:

Ensure bank receipts match what’s on the ledger.
Understand and investigate reconciliation breaks.
Identify the root cause of a discrepancy.
Analyse and leverage data for business decisions.

For example, in the screenshot below, £50k was not reconciled and marked as an anomaly.

Users can then click through to see the individual transactions that make up that figure and find where the reconciliation went wrong.

Automate reconciliation and report generation

Kani can automatically produce reconciliation reports that are specific to payments companies, such as QMR and GOC reports, settlement reconciliation reports, safeguarding reports and more.

The platform provides you with prefabricated report templates, so you don’t have to worry about what you should and shouldn’t include. You’ll also be able to:

Customise reports in order to present data exactly as you want it.
Create reports that are tailored to each of your clients.
Configure the platform to automatically send reports to clients and other relevant internal and external parties, even if they are not a user on the platform(for example, you can send a report to your CEO every Monday at 2:00pm).

With automatic reconciliation and reporting, Kani eliminates the potential for human error (and the fines that may result) and enables your financial teams to spend more time investigating and resolving discrepancies.

Reduce costly errors and maintain compliance

In addition to consuming lots of time, manual reconciliation processes are error-prone. When you’re working with Excel spreadsheets, it’s easy to accidentally delete or change data–or lose your work entirely if the application crashes! People on your team may also approach reconciliations differently, leading to inconsistencies and disorganisation.

Eliminate mistakes caused by human error

Kani applies the same reconciliation process uniformly based on predefined rules and workflows, increasing data accuracy and consistency.

The platform converts all of your files into the same user-friendly format, making it easier to drill down into the individual transactions to investigate discrepancies. It maintains copies of the original data for reference.

Data can be edited and configured as required for reporting and reconciliation, but any amends will be marked with who has changed what and when. A raw version (before any amends) will also be maintained in the database. And you can create user groups in order to share/control access to data (e.g., read-only and sign-off) —- for example, if you want to share data with clients or provide an auditor with access to your data.

Maintain a full audit trail and sign-off on reports

A verifiable audit trail is all but impossible with manual reconciliations. You can’t easily track changes in an Excel spreadsheet. And if you want to maintain a version history of your reconciliations, you must do so manually (i.e., manually saving the documents each time). Excel spreadsheets also don’t provide sign-off capabilities, which is why some regulators require companies to print reconciliations daily and complete a wet signature to ensure the final version.

Kani allows you to configure snapshots of financial documents at your desired frequency (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly), providing you with a version history to recover data if something goes wrong (such as data loss or corruption).

If there is a variance in your reconciliation, Kani’s Case Manager feature assigns it to a specific user so they can investigate and resolve discrepancies as they occur.

The platform tracks all user actions via notes and attachments. File changes are marked with a timestamp that includes the time and person who made the change, providing an iron-clad audit trail should you need it.

With Kani, a senior leader can complete an electronic signature once a reconciliation or report is finished, making it much easier to agree on a final version. It marks the final version with a timestamp. If a change is made after the sign-off, the platform immediately flags it and alerts you.

Prepare for external audits with different user accesses

Preparing for external audits can be a nightmare, especially if you still rely on manual intervention and reconciliation methods.

With Excel spreadsheets, it’s difficult to maintain the integrity and reliability of your data. The risk of errors, such as accidentally deleting a figure, column or file can throw off your accounting process and force your team to spend hours trying to figure out what went wrong.

But Kani ensures data integrity and regulatory compliance by:

Once data is modelled in the database and in a tabular reconciliation, only allowing users to amend the amount (rather than the raw data) and tracking who amended what and when.
Storing an unaltered version of the original file, so the data is always available for reference.
Generating properly formatted scheme compliance reports and other reports required by entities like the FCA, reducing your risk of fines.
Maintaining a full audit trail and tracking all changes made during reconciliations.

You can also use Kani’s user group functions to give an auditor read-only access to the platform, making it easier for them to conduct their review.

How a payment company uses Kani to fully automate their safeguarding reconciliation and reporting

One of our customers is a payment company required to create daily safeguarding reports. In the past, their finance department had to manually review all transactions daily for each of their client’s safeguarding accounts, create safeguarding reports for each account (for internal review and audit trails), ensure that each account had the correct balance and move funds into the appropriate accounts when necessary. And any mistake in these financial processes could result in fines.

Adopting automation allowed the company to eliminate the majority of its manual compliance burden. On a daily basis, Kani automatically:

Ingests financial data for their safeguarding accounts and performs reconciliations.
Creates properly formatted safeguarding reconciliation reports and saves a replica of each report.
Sends the report to the appropriate person by a certain time.

Now, the finance team only needs to access Kani when they receive an alert to transfer funds and correct anomalies. By automating these financial control processes, Kani helps them save time and avoid fines by maintaining the integrity of their safeguarding accounts.

Use Kani for faster, more reliable reconciliations and reports

Manual reconciliation is time-consuming and unreliable. It leaves your finance teams with little time to adequately investigate and resolve discrepancies, especially as they rush to meet financial close deadlines. And it exposes you to inaccuracies created by human error and fraud, as well as the potential fines that come with it.

Automated reconciliation makes reconciliations faster and more reliable. Kani is the only reconciliation solution designed by payments experts to address the needs of payments companies, such as automating QMR and GOC scheme reports.

To learn more about how Kani can improve your reconciliation process, schedule a demo today.