Blog Post
Corporate Credit Card Reconciliation: The Complete Guide
For modern businesses, corporate credit cards are a necessity for agility. They allow teams to travel, buy software, and manage expenses without red tape. However, for the finance team, they create a massive reconciliation headache. Thousands of small transactions, missing receipts, and data silos can turn month-end into a nightmare. This guide covers everything you need to know about mastering the credit card reconciliation process.
The Challenge of Volume
Unlike bank statements which might have a few hundred consolidated lines, credit card statements are often thousands of lines long. Every Uber ride, every coffee, every SaaS subscription is a separate line item.
Reconciling this manually involves a three-way match that is prone to error:
- The Bank Feed: The transaction data from Visa/Amex/Mastercard.
- The Expense Report: The employee's submission (often with missing receipts).
- The General Ledger: Where the expense needs to be booked.
Why Automation is the Only Way Forward
Trying to manage corporate cards in Excel is a recipe for burnout. It leads to:
- Delayed Closings: Waiting for employees to submit reports delays the entire financial close.
- Fraud Risk: Without automated checks, duplicate expenses or personal purchases slip through.
- Lack of Visibility: You don't know your true spend until weeks after the month ends.
Best Practices for Credit Card Reconciliation
To tame the chaos, adopt these strategies:
1. Connect Feeds Directly
Never rely on paper statements. Use a reconciliation tool that pulls transaction data directly from the card issuer via API. This ensures you are working with real-time, unalterable data.
2. Automate Receipt Matching
Modern software can use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read receipts and automatically match them to the corresponding bank transaction. This eliminates manual data entry for 90% of expenses.
3. Implement "Soft Close" Policies
Don't wait until day 30. Reconcile weekly. By encouraging a continuous reconciliation process, you catch missing receipts early when employees still remember the expense.
How Reconwizz Solves This
Reconwizz is designed to handle high-volume transaction matching effortlessly. Our platform ingests data from any card provider and automatically matches it against your expense management system and ERP.
We handle the complex "many-to-one" scenarios (like one payment covering multiple card swipes) that break standard rules. Plus, our integration with general ledger systems ensures that once a card is reconciled, the journal entries are posted automatically. (Learn more about our Card & ATM Reconciliation solutions).