🎯 The Challenge
Kapital.io, a Berlin-based Series A payments infrastructure startup, processes hundreds of thousands of transactions monthly across six banking relationships in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. Their three-person finance team spent four full working days every month manually reconciling transactions in spreadsheets, cross-checking bank statements against their internal ledger, and tracking down discrepancies. As transaction volume grew 60 % year-on-year, the team was approaching the point where manual reconciliation would become physically impossible—and hiring additional finance staff was not in the budget before their next funding round.
🔬 The Solution
The CFO integrated Softstack Research's AutoReco product in two weeks. AutoReco connected directly to Kapital.io's six bank feeds via Open Banking APIs and mapped transactions to their existing ERP ledger categories using rule-based matching augmented by machine-learning suggestions. The system automatically flagged the 2–3 % of transactions that required human review, surfacing likely matches and the confidence score for each. The finance team moved from line-by-line reconciliation to exception-only review overnight.
"Before AutoReco, month-end close was the thing I dreaded most. Now it almost runs itself. My team has gone from being data-entry clerks to actual finance partners to the business. The ROI is obvious and the implementation was genuinely smooth."
📈 The Results
Month-end close dropped from four days to six hours. The finance team recovered 110 person-hours per month—time they now spend on cashflow forecasting and scenario planning. The error rate in reconciled entries fell to near zero; in the first three months AutoReco was live, not a single discrepancy reached the CFO's desk that the system had missed. At year-end audit, the external auditors noted the reconciliation trail as 'exemplary' and reduced their audit fee by 15 % owing to the completeness of the automated records. The CFO calculated a 7× ROI on the AutoReco subscription within the first quarter.
Key outcomes
- 94 % — Month-end close time reduction
- 6 — Bank accounts reconciled automatically
- 110 hrs — Finance team hours saved / month