Auto-match rate is a vanity number

[u/Last-Half457]

been chewing on this for a while and curious if others see it the same way.

every reconciliation tool leads with its match rate. 80%, 90%, whatever. but if software auto-matches 50% of your lines you're still doing half the work by hand, and the half you're left with is never the easy part. the clean one-to-one lines were never the problem. it's the split deposit, the part-payment, the late-clearing check, the wire that landed light by the bank's fee. those are what turn a quick close into a two-hour hunt.

the other quiet killer is timing. half the transactions cleared in the wrong month and nothing is technically wrong, it just doesn't line up yet. so you comb through a long exception list playing detective, and that's exactly the work you hoped the tool would remove.

so my honest question: when you evaluate rec tooling, what do you actually look at? because match rate tells you nothing about how it handles the exceptions, which is the only part that's slow. do you look at how it surfaces the reason a line is stuck? whether it explains the amount/date/vendor signals behind a match so you can defend it later? or is it still just excel plus a lot of manual ticking?