Introducing Clarative MatchPoint — purpose-built balance sheet reconciliation for finance teams who have outgrown spreadsheets
Every finance team has a version of the same problem.
At the end of each period, someone opens a shared drive, copies last month’s reconciliation template, and starts filling it in. The file gets emailed around. Comments accumulate in the margin. Someone overwrites someone else’s work. The controller chases status updates by replying to a chain of replies. The auditors ask for evidence and nobody can remember which version of the file was the final one.
This is how most organisations reconcile their balance sheet. Not because it works well — it doesn’t — but because nobody has ever built something better that isn’t a £200,000 enterprise implementation with a six-month rollout.
MatchPoint is that something better.
The problem with reconciling in Excel
The spreadsheet approach to balance sheet reconciliation has three structural problems that no amount of process discipline can fix.
No workflow. A spreadsheet is a document, not a process. There is no concept of a reconciliation being submitted, reviewed, or approved within the file itself. Status is tracked separately — in a tracker tab, in an email, in someone’s head. When the controller asks where things stand, someone has to check manually.
No audit trail. Every action on a reconciliation needs to be traceable: who prepared it, who reviewed it, what changed and when. A spreadsheet records none of this. The version history in SharePoint, if it exists, is not an audit trail — it is a list of saves. When auditors ask who approved a reconciliation and when, the answer is often an email with a one-line reply.
No visibility. The person responsible for the close — the controller, the CFO — has no real-time view of where things stand. They have whatever status they were last told, which may or may not reflect reality. Chasing status is manual work, and it scales badly when you have forty accounts across three subsidiaries and a close deadline in two days.
How MatchPoint works
MatchPoint is a web application that replaces the spreadsheet workflow with a structured, auditable process. It is not a NetSuite module — it sits alongside your ERP, pulling in the GL balances it needs and providing a proper workflow layer on top.
The lifecycle of a reconciliation in MatchPoint looks like this:
Period opens. An administrator creates the reconciliation period. MatchPoint automatically generates a reconciliation task for every active account that requires sign-off, with due dates, assignees, and the current GL balance already populated. Preparers log in and see their queue immediately — no setup work, no copying last month’s file.
Preparer works. The preparer opens their reconciliation, reviews the GL balance, and documents the supporting items — reconciling entries, explanations, attachments. When they are satisfied, they submit for approval. The reconciliation moves to the approver’s queue. The preparer cannot approve their own work.
Approver reviews. The approver sees the submission, reviews the documentation, and either approves or returns it with comments. The approval is timestamped and attributed. Every action — submission, return, approval, comment — is logged to a full audit trail.
Controller sees the picture. Throughout the process, a real-time dashboard shows status across all accounts: how many are not started, in progress, awaiting approval, complete. The controller can see at a glance where the bottlenecks are without sending a single email.
Where MatchPoint saves real time
Two features in particular reduce the mechanical work of reconciliation significantly.
Carry-forward. For accounts that are stable month to month — fixed asset schedules, prepayments, intercompany balances — the prior period’s reconciling items carry forward automatically. The preparer reviews and updates rather than rebuilding from scratch. For most organisations, this applies to 50–70% of accounts and reduces preparation time accordingly.
Auto-certification. For accounts where the GL balance is zero and the prior period was fully approved, MatchPoint can certify automatically — no human action required. For accounts with an agreed variance threshold, submissions within that threshold are auto-approved on submission. The result is that routine accounts clear themselves, and human review time concentrates on the accounts that actually need it.
Neither feature bypasses the audit trail. Auto-certified reconciliations are logged with the reason, timestamp, and the criteria that triggered certification. The auditor can see exactly what happened and why.
Delegation and continuity
Month-end close does not pause for annual leave. MatchPoint includes a delegation system that allows a preparer or approver to temporarily assign their responsibilities to a colleague — with a defined scope and end date, and full visibility to the administrator. When the delegation ends, responsibilities revert automatically.
This sounds like a small thing. In practice, the alternative — someone accessing a colleague’s email account, or manually reassigning spreadsheets — creates exactly the kind of undocumented, untraceable action that auditors ask questions about.
What auditors actually see
MatchPoint includes a read-only auditor access role. Auditors log in directly, navigate to the accounts and periods they need to review, and see the complete reconciliation — balance, supporting items, attachments, approval chain, and audit trail — without requiring anyone to prepare a pack or export a file.
Cint Group, a Nasdaq Stockholm-listed insights technology company, implemented MatchPoint for their balance sheet reconciliation process. Their finance team put it plainly: “MatchPoint has been a game-changer for us. The product has streamlined our balance sheet reconciliation process, giving us a single source of truth for all reconciliations while providing our auditors with easy, read-only access to comprehensive reports.”
That last point — a single source of truth — matters more than it sounds. When your reconciliation process runs across twelve spreadsheets in a shared drive, there is no single source of truth. There is a collection of files, each of which may or may not be the final version. MatchPoint is the record. There is only one.
Multi-subsidiary support
MatchPoint is built for organisations with more than one entity. Accounts are configured per subsidiary, with subsidiary-specific assignees, due dates, and account settings. Administrators and senior reviewers can see across all subsidiaries. Preparers and approvers see only the entities they are responsible for.
The combination of subsidiary filtering and role-based access means the system works for a single-entity SME and a multi-entity international group without configuration overhead in either case.
Getting started
MatchPoint is built and maintained by Fowlers Consulting Services Ltd. It is a production system, currently deployed for clients including Cint Group.
If your month-end close still involves emailed spreadsheets, a shared drive, and a controller manually chasing status — we would be glad to show you what it looks like when it works properly.
Request a demonstration at clarative.co.uk
Fowlers Consulting Services Ltd are an AI-first NetSuite consultancy based in the UK. We build and implement financial systems that solve the problems standard software leaves behind. Get in touch.
Related reading: Reconciling GRNI in NetSuite — Why the Account Balance Isn’t Enough