Case Study · Bank Reconciliation
How we helped an accounting firm cut bank reconciliation time from 1 hr to 10 mins
Mid-market accounting firm · 300+ business clients · Bookkeeping, Tax, Payroll & Audits
83.3%
reduction in time per reconciliation
10 mins
current process duration with Rima
19 clients
expanded to within 1 month
About the firm
The accounting firm is a mid-market firm serving 300+ businesses. The firm supports customers with Bookkeeping, Tax, Payroll and Audits. The firm had experienced capacity shortages on several occasions, stemming from the broader industry accountant shortage. They sought out an AI-forward solution to give their team more capacity.
One month after meeting with the Rima team and launching an automation for a single client, they achieved an 83% average time savings across their bank reconciliation process. They soon expanded this to 19 additional clients.
The challenge
Mid-market accounting firms that support hundreds of clients often rely on a team of accountants to execute work and serve as client advisors. With limited capacity, accountants struggled to complete all reconciliations on time — leaving less time for higher-value advisory work.
The team needed a system that could:
- Extract data from bank statements and sales records
- Reconcile sales with bank deposits
- Track in-transit accounts, bank fees, and discrepancies
- Populate workpaper reports
- Complete the full process in a few minutes
The solution
The firm implemented Rima's Blueprint solution for their manual reconciliation work. Their solution was delivered in a single Blueprint — an accounting workflow automation — that handled the extraction, matching, edge case logic, and workpaper template population end-to-end.
Rima analyzed the monthly bank reconciliation workflow performed manually: pulling bank statements from banking portals, sales records from POS systems, manually entering data into workpapers, then matching both sets while accounting for deposit windows, in-transit items, credit card fees, chargebacks, and internal transfers.
Rima interviewed the team on their process, edge cases, and output formatting, then built a Blueprint tailored to their workflow. Each run executes deterministically — same logic, same Excel templates, every time.
Bulk run capability
The team can execute all client reconciliations in parallel. In under 10 minutes, bank recs for all clients can be completed using Rima's bulk run capability — compounding the time savings across every client on the roster.
Why it led to sustained capacity growth
After using Rima for manual reconciliation on a single client, the firm expanded the solution to 19 more clients (with more in the pipeline). This reflects a broader trend: accounting teams tend to switch to Rima when they're looking for a true AI partner that understands off-ERP work, rather than a simple chatbot solution.
- Custom workflows built with few-click runs
- Built-in provenance and traceability
- Dedicated implementation and support team
- Ongoing optimizations
The Takeaway
Accountants spend time doing work outside ERP systems — in tools like Excel, PDFs, and Word docs. By leveraging an AI-forward workspace like Rima, accountants can codify their mental models and processes into Blueprints that execute work for them in minutes, leading to more capacity for the team.
Ready to see results like this at your firm?