I’ve been manually reconciling our sales and shipping data every Friday afternoon, and it’s eating up half my day. I keep wondering if there’s a smarter way to handle this, maybe even automate the matching process entirely, but I’m not sure where to start or if it’s even worth the hassle. Has anyone else been in this spot?
Automation could cut the Friday drag significantly if you scope it right. Start by mapping the exact fields you compare and decide what counts as a match and a mismatch. Then run a small test overnight and review the results.
I hear the Friday time sink and I would feel the same in that chair. Maybe batch the work and let the system do the repetitive checks while you handle the exceptions with a quick review the next morning.
Framing it as a neat automation solve may be optimistic. Real world data has quirks you learn from and you may always need a small manual pass.
What if the problem is not the reconciliation but the data that feeds it Could shifting to upstream data quality reduce the need for a complex matcher
If you treat the friday check like a script run you can write small rules and have one person review flagged items only
I would try a basic join in a sheet or a tiny script and see how many mismatches slip through and adjust from there
Some teams tolerate a few mismatches if speed is the priority and others demand strict accuracy the balance depends on your customer needs