Introduction
Input credit leakage almost always starts with unmatched vendor invoices. Here is how to close the gap without adding headcount.
Why 2B reconciliation eats so much time
supplier tax data arrives as a static statement. Your purchase register lives somewhere else. Matching them means comparing thousands of line items on tax registration, invoice number, date and taxable value — four fields that vendors get wrong in slightly different ways every month.
Most teams do this in a spreadsheet, find a few hundred mismatches, and then run out of time to chase them. The credit is not lost permanently, but it is deferred, and deferred credit is working capital sitting with the government.
The three mismatch types that matter
Not all mismatches deserve equal effort. In practice they fall into three groups.
- Timing differences — the vendor filed late. These resolve themselves next month and need tracking, not chasing.
- Data errors — the invoice number or tax registration was keyed differently. These are matchable with fuzzy logic and should never reach a human.
- Genuine absences — the vendor has not filed at all. These are the only ones that need a phone call, and they are usually a small minority.
Automating the first two categories
When your purchase register and your GST data live in the same system, timing differences can be flagged and carried forward automatically, and data errors can be matched on a combination of amount, date proximity and vendor identity rather than exact string equality.
That leaves your team with the genuine absences — the ones where a human conversation with the vendor is the only thing that will work.
Making the vendor follow-up systematic
The follow-up itself is repetitive: identify the invoice, contact the right person at the vendor, explain what is missing, and check again after they file. This is precisely the kind of work an agent handles well, because the outcome is unambiguous — either the credit appears in the next 2B or it does not.
What good looks like
A well-run reconciliation cycle should take an afternoon of review rather than a week of preparation. Your accountant should be exercising judgement on the exceptions, not assembling the comparison. If most of the month-end effort is still assembly, the process rather than the people is the problem.
In summary
None of this requires a transformation programme. It requires deciding where each piece of data is created, making sure it is only created once, and letting everything downstream read from that record instead of keeping its own copy.
CA Rakesh Menon, Head of Compliance at easyto.work.
