Make It Match

The afternoon this book is about

The ledger says one number. The bank says another. The gap is $41,000, month-end is tomorrow, and somewhere in eleven hundred rows there’s a payment that settled four invoices at once, a customer whose name has a trailing space, and a wire whose reference says nothing more helpful than TRANSFER.

You have a highlighter and a lot of scrolling ahead of you.

Make It Match is about never having that afternoon again.

It isn’t a book about reconciliation software

Tools are excellent, and if your company buys one, use it. This is for the far more common situation: you have Excel, two lists that ought to agree, and a defensible answer due tomorrow. Everything here is built from formulas you can read, explain to an auditor, and hand to whoever takes your job in two years.

What you actually get

The book — 125 pages, twelve chapters, four parts. Not a function reference. Each chapter opens with the business problem, defines its terms in plain English, then builds the solution step by step: one-to-one matching, tolerance, one payment against many invoices, many-to-many, subset-sum, fuzzy matching on messy references, duplicates and reversals, timing differences, aging the residual, and finally a reconciliation that proves itself.

The workbook — 26 tabs, Ask Eijaz - Make It Match.xlsx. Not a blank template. It’s one complete worked reconciliation for an invented company, with three years of sales invoices and bank receipts, already built and already working. Open a tab, change a number, watch the whole thing re-run.

The sample data is deliberately imperfect, because yours is: amounts stored as text, trailing spaces, duplicate invoice numbers, a reference with no invoice number in it, a payment and its reversal, and cash that arrived on the wrong side of the cutoff. All of it is in the book.

Every solution twice. Once for Excel 2016 and earlier, because a great many finance teams are on locked-down builds and a book that assumes otherwise is useless to them. Once for Excel 365, because when you do have the modern functions some of these problems stop being problems. Each pair says plainly which to use, why, and what older Excel gives up. Tabs come in pairs too — a navy tab that works in 2016, and a gold 365 twin that does the identical job with spilled formulas.

Nothing in it is illustrative. Every number quoted in the text and every figure in the book was computed from the companion workbook. If the book says a receipt is out by $6,845.86, you can open the file and find that row.

Inside the covers

• Chapter 1 — what “reconciled” actually means, and the control total that makes the whole thing trustworthy
• Chapter 2 — keys, and why one trailing space causes more failed matches than every other cause combined
• Chapters 3–4 — matching properly, and setting a tolerance you can defend to an auditor
• Chapters 5–7 — one payment against several invoices, many-to-many, and the subset-sum hunt
• Chapters 8–10 — fuzzy matching, duplicates and reversals, and separating timing from error
• Chapters 11–12 — aging the residual the way a controller wants it, and a file that tells you when it’s finished
• Back matter — 25 patterns quoted at the cell address where you’ll find them, a tab index, and a monthly checklist

Who it’s for

You reconcile something every month — sales ledger to bank, subledger to GL, payroll to the control account, intercompany to intercompany. You know SUM and VLOOKUP. You don’t consider yourself an Excel person and you’d rather not have to be.

You don’t need to be. You need about nine patterns, and this is those nine patterns.

Who it isn’t for: anyone looking for VBA macros or Power Query pipelines. This is deliberately formulas only — because formulas survive being emailed, opened on a locked-down machine, and inherited by someone who has never met you.

Try before you buy

The free sample is chapter 11 in full — aging the residual, described the way a controller actually wants it — plus the contents. It’s the one chapter that stands on its own, so you can read it cold. Judge the book from the book.

Download the free sample (PDF, 15 pages) — no email address, no sign-up. Pass it on to anyone who’d find it useful.

What it’s worth

Dedicated reconciliation software starts around $300 a month and runs to $999 and beyond. That’s the right answer at volume, and it isn’t available to most people reading this.

The alternative is your own time. If manual matching costs you six hours a month, this pays for itself before you finish chapter 2 — and unlike the six hours, it doesn’t come back next month.