Automating Financial Reconciliation with n8n
Highlights
The Client
A European fintech back-office provider managing monthly residual disbursements across 15 to 20 ISO partner accounts. Three finance staff spent two full days every month-end manually cross-referencing ISO reports against bank deposit records in a shared spreadsheet. They needed full automation with zero disruption to existing tools.
Product/Service
The client delivers back-office financial reconciliation: matching expected ISO residual payments against actual bank deposits, surfacing discrepancies, and reporting to finance leadership.
The service enables teams to:
The goal of the product is to reduce the operational burden of manual reconciliation and to ensure that businesses have reliable, real-time insights into their financial status.
Goals & Objectives
Eliminate manual reconciliation by building an automation system that ingests reports in multiple formats, applies per-ISO tolerance logic, matches expected vs received amounts, and produces a live dashboard with zero human input on routine cycles. Every run must produce a traceable, timestamped audit record for compliance.
Project Challenges
■ No standardised input format: ISO reports arrived as CSV, Excel, and PDF with inconsistent column naming requiring a multi-format normalisation layer
■ Per-ISO tolerance logic: each account had a different contractual mismatch threshold that the engine had to evaluate dynamically to avoid false alerts
■ No new tooling: the solution had to integrate into the existing reporting workflow without replacing or rebuilding what finance leadership already used
Solution
AltheraCode built an event-driven reconciliation pipeline in n8n with five stages, triggered by monthly cron and callable via webhook on early ISO submission.
Ingestion and Normalisation. n8n polls Dropbox and SMTP inbox, maps 4 report formats to a canonical schema, writes to PostgreSQL staging table.
Tolerance-Aware Matching. Engine queries daily bank deposit data, evaluates amount delta against per-ISO config in PostgreSQL, writes matched / mismatch / missing status.
Alert Engine. Mismatch emails sent to ISO with delta detail and CC to finance team. Missing submissions trigger reminder plus 48-hour manager escalation.
Live Dashboard Write. Summary row appended to existing reporting sheet after each run: period totals, counts, net delta, timestamp.
Archive and Audit Log. Source files, email records, and summary zipped to Dropbox per period. Immutable PostgreSQL audit entry per run.
Our Results
The financial reconciliation automation delivered by Althera Code significantly improved efficiency, accuracy, and overall reliability of the process. Key outcomes included:
A 40-hour monthly manual process replaced by a fully automated, audit-ready pipeline that runs without human input and gives the finance team back two full working days every month.
Drop Us a Line
Tallinn, Estonia
linnaosa, Vesivärava tn 51-202, 10152