Bank Reconciliation Automation for [UK Distribution Co]

Anonymised at the client's request. Industry, scale, and outcome figures are real; the client name is replaced with a placeholder.

Company snapshot

[UK Distribution Co, ~75 staff, £30–50m turnover, single trading entity.] Distributes industrial consumables across the UK and Ireland out of two warehouses. Finance team of five reporting into the FD; AR/AP roles are split.

The challenge

The finance team reconciled four UK bank accounts every business day — current account, EUR currency account, dedicated AR-collections account, and a payroll-only account. BC's standard bank reconciliation engine handled the upload but not much more; the team manually matched 60–65% of statement lines to ledger entries against payment references that were inconsistent at best, missing at worst.

Three problems compounded:

• Daily time sink. A senior AR clerk spent three to three-and-a-half hours every morning on bank rec, before doing anything else. That was their day's most cognitively demanding work consumed by line-by-line matching.
• Slow month-end. Whatever didn't reconcile during the month landed in the close as a bulk problem. Month-end close was consistently mid-week-2.
• Same problems, every month. The team kept making the same matching decisions over and over — e.g., "payment ref ABC123 from this customer is always for invoice 4567 less the 2.5% prompt-payment discount" — with no way to teach BC to remember.

The approach

Deployment of Amplio's UK Bank Statement Importer & Smart Reconciliation extension across all four bank accounts, paired with a small Power BI report giving the FD daily visibility on what was unreconciled and why.

Three components:

1. UK Bank Statement Importer AL extension. Native importers for the four UK formats they used (Barclays for current and AR-collections; HSBC for EUR; Lloyds for payroll). Multi-account orchestration runs all four imports in a single morning session.
2. Smart Reconciliation rule engine. Each manual match the AR clerk made was captured as a candidate rule; after 30 days, the engine had ~140 active rules covering the top customers and the big recurring vendors. From day 60 onwards it was matching first and the AR clerk was reviewing exceptions.
3. Power BI "unreconciled at end of day" tile. Daily total on the FD's morning dashboard, with one-click drill-down by bank account and ageing bucket. Stops surprises landing at month-end.

Customer note

“Bank rec used to take the first three hours of our AR clerk's morning, every day. With Amplio's extension that's down to about 25 minutes, and we've pulled month-end close from working day 8 to working day 3. Saved us hours every week.”

The outcome

• Daily reconciliation time: ~3 hours/day → ~25 minutes/day for the AR clerk. Two-thirds of that 25 minutes is now exception review, not first-pass matching.
• Auto-match rate: ~35% (BC default behaviour against their data) → 92% steady-state after the first 60 days of rule learning.
• Month-end close: shifted from typically WD8–9 to WD3–4. The pulled-forward bank rec was the single biggest contributor; close discipline elsewhere helped too but bank rec was the unblocker.

Tech stack

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Cloud SaaS, single tenant)
• Custom AL extension — UK Bank Statement Importer & Smart Reconciliation (publishing to AppSource Q3 2026)
• Power BI — FD daily dashboard with unreconciled-at-EOD tile
• Power Automate — nightly rule-engine training job

Engagement shape

Discovery: 1 week. Build and account-by-account rollout: 3 weeks. Rule learning runs alongside the AR clerk's normal day — the engine improves on its own from day 1; the team was reviewing exceptions only by week 8. Total elapsed time to go-live: 4 weeks.

Post-launch: 90 days of bundled support, then a light retainer covering version updates and the occasional new bank format (a fifth account was added in early 2026 and took half a day to onboard).

Drowning in daily bank rec? Talk to Amplio — happy to share the rule-engine architecture and onboarding pattern with anyone running multi-account UK reconciliation.