Closing month-end four days earlier at Harbour & Vale
A 22-person practice was reconciling client ledgers by hand. We automated coding and matching, keeping the accountant as the approver.
Skilled accountants doing unskilled matching
Harbour & Vale served 140 small business clients. Each month-end meant coding thousands of transactions and matching receipts by hand. Senior staff were spending the first ten days of every month on work a junior could do, if there had been a junior available.
Learn each client chart of accounts, then propose rather than decide
The system learns coding patterns per client from three years of approved history, then proposes a code and a match for each transaction with a confidence score. Nothing posts without an accountant approving it, but approving a screen of correct suggestions takes minutes instead of hours.
Every suggestion carries its reasoning
For audit purposes each automated code records what it matched on: the vendor, the historical pattern, the receipt line. Reviewers see that trail beside the transaction, and the practice can produce it years later without reconstructing anyone memory.
A month-end that finishes in the first week
Coding accuracy against accountant review sits at 97%. Month-end close moved four days earlier, and the practice took on 40 additional clients over the following year with the same headcount.
The value was not speed. It was that our people stopped doing the part of the job they resented.
HVManaging Partner, Harbour & Vale