3-day Virtual Seminar

Find the Missing Money: Reconcile Two Messy Exports in Excel

Overview

This working session takes two deliberately messy exports and builds a reconciliation that survives contact with the real world. Attendees learn to normalize keys before matching, tier results into exact matches, probable matches, duplicates, and true exceptions, and produce an exception list a manager can act on. The result is a refreshable model: next month, the same workbook does the same job in minutes rather than hours.

Why you should Attend

Manual matching does not scale, and it leaves no evidence behind. When a variance appears, you cannot show which records matched, which were judgment calls, and which were never resolved at all - so small differences get written off as immaterial and quietly repeat every month. If the person who does your reconciliation leaves, the method leaves with them. This session replaces the highlighter with a documented process that produces the same answer twice.

Areas Covered in the Session

• The M.A.T.C.H. framework: Map the sources, Align keys and formats, Tier the matches, Confirm the probables, Hand off the exceptions
• Profiling both exports before you match: row counts, control totals, and where the data is actually dirty
• Building a reliable match key - trimming, casing, padding, stripping punctuation, and normalizing dates and currency
• Exact matching with Power Query merges, and why VLOOKUP quietly hides your duplicates
• Tiering results: exact matches, probable matches, one-to-many and many-to-one duplicates, and unmatched records on both sides
• Fuzzy matching for names and descriptions - where it earns its keep, and where it will confidently pair the wrong two rows
• Making the exception list actionable: aging, ownership, dollar impact, and suggested resolution
• Proving completeness with a two-sided control total so nothing disappears between the source and the summary
• Turning the whole thing into a refreshable monthly routine your colleague can also run
  

Who Will Benefit

• Accountants, Staff Accountants, and Controllers
  
• Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable Specialists
  
• Financial Analysts and FP&A Professionals
  
• Revenue Operations and Billing Analysts
  
• Business and Data Analysts supporting finance
  
• Internal Auditors and Compliance Analysts
  
• Operations Managers responsible for month-end close