The Future of AP Reconciliation Is Here – and It’s Fully Automated

Reconciliation is one of the most time-consuming, error-prone tasks in finance, especially during the month-end close. In fact, nearly half of midmarket companies take more than six business days to close their books, largely due to manual reconciliations, and finance teams often spend up to 50 hours per month on this alone. But what if your system could do the matching for you? Line by line, invoice by statement, with minimal human intervention?

In this Q&A with DocLink’s Director of Product Management Merri Jo Cleair, we explore how DocLink’s new Reconciliation module is transforming the close process with automation that’s not just smart…it’s scalable.

Q: Why is reconciliation such a pain point for finance teams?
A: Reconciliation is one of those tedious, repetitive tasks that eats up a huge amount of time. Whether you’re matching invoices to vendor statements or verifying payments, it’s a lot of manual work. Spreadsheets, digging through folders, back-and-forth emails. Does that sound familiar? For some teams, it adds up to dozens or hundreds of hours every month. And as your business grows, so does the burden.

Q: Can you give an example of how much time that adds up to?
A: One national produce distributor reconciles around 400 vendor statements monthly and estimated that each statement would take approximately 10 minutes to review. That adds up to 66 hours a month, or 800+ hours a year. That’s roughly 40% of a full-time employee’s time spent just reconciling. The savings potential of automating your reconciliations alone – not even taking not consideration the complete add-value that DocLink delivers – effectively offsets the cost of DocLink, delivering near-immediate ROI. And that’s before we talk about potential errors or missed discrepancies.

Q: How does DocLink help automate reconciliation?
A: Our new Reconciliation module was actually born out of a question from a customer during a demo. One of our sales engineers was showing off our automated PO matching when someone asked, “Hey, can we use this to match other types of documents?” It didn’t take long for us to realize that we absolutely could.

It uses similar line-item matching logic as PO matching, but now you can reconcile line-item data from one document with another document – or even with data in your ERP.

Here’s an example of how it works: Throughout the month, you receive customer orders that are automatically indexed in DocLink. At month-end, you receive a summary statement. That statement is the trigger. DocLink runs a check on all orders that came in that month and reconciles them against the statement.

If everything matches, DocLink moves those orders forward automatically. If something doesn’t match, it flags that one item for you to look at. You’re not scanning every single line; you’re only stepping in when there’s a discrepancy.

Q: Can you walk me through what happens when there is a discrepancy?
A: Definitely. We’ve built it so users only interact with exceptions…and even then it’s simple. Let’s say you have a customer order where the invoice number doesn’t match the statement. That’s a linking error. The user sees that right at the top of the viewer. You press the Link button, correct the value if it was an OCR issue, select the correct line, press OK, and it’s done.

Then you’ve got validation exceptions. These occur when the system links the order, but it fails one of your rules, like a rule saying invoice amounts must be within a $2 variance. If it’s outside that range, say by $3.05, you get flagged. You can fix the number, reject it, override the variance with a comment, or unlink and reprocess. Again, this is all automated until a rule fails.

And here’s the really exciting part. If a discrepancy is found, DocLink can automatically email the supplier with the issue. It moves the document into a specific status, triggers an email with a tokenized template, and lets the supplier know exactly what’s wrong. Then when they send in a corrected invoice, Smart Capture pulls it back in, and DocLink runs it through again. If it’s fixed, the system auto-matches it and pushes it through. In many scenarios, this becomes fully autonomous. No one has to touch it at all.

Q: What kind of ROI can companies expect from this?
A: One of our customers who handles a high volume of orders every month said this module saved them nearly 80 hours in a single cycle. They only had to touch a handful of exceptions – literally only 1% of their orders. Everything else matched automatically. And when you compare the cost of DocLink to the savings in labor and accuracy? The ROI is practically immediate. This one feature can pay for itself very quickly.

Q: Is it only for AP teams and vendor statements?
A: Not at all, and that’s what’s so exciting. Yes, vendor statements are a classic example, but you can think bigger. One customer talked about using this for reconciling EFT remittances with open AR. Another is considering validating recurring AP invoices against contract terms. You could even use this to verify whether all expected invoices were received that month, or match payments against bank statements.

And it doesn’t stop with finance. Reconciliation can be applied anywhere you’re doing cross-record validation – compliance, inventory, sales reporting. The potential really is broad.

Q: How does it integrate with existing systems?
A: DocLink works with both cloud and on-prem systems. Once reconciliation is complete, you can export results in XML or JSON formats and send them right into your ERP. Minimal IT lift, maximum efficiency.

Q: What makes DocLink different from other solutions?
A: This module is where DocLink really stands apart. No one else in the AP automation space is doing this level of reconciliation automation. There are some stand-alone tools out there, but with DocLink, it’s all part of a unified platform. When you can scale automation, capture, workflow, and reconciliation all in one place, you unlock efficiencies you just can’t get from disconnected solutions.

And because it’s all built-in, from document ingestion to exception routing to auto-emailing suppliers, it’s streamlined and powerful. That’s what customers love.

Q: So what’s the bottom line?
A: Reconciliation doesn’t have to be a monthly grind. With DocLink, you’re eliminating the manual drudgery. You’re catching discrepancies earlier. You’re closing the books faster. And most importantly, you’re freeing up your team to do more valuable work.

Customers we’ve previewed this with are genuinely excited. The idea of a system that can reconcile, flag issues, notify suppliers, and keep things moving without needing someone to babysit the process? It’s a game changer.