For fintechs, marketplaces and platforms moving other people’s money

Your ledger and your bank stopped agreeing three months ago.

I find where money, data and ownership diverge across your processor, your bank and your ledger. Then I rebuild the process so close takes days instead of weeks, without adding headcount.

Book a 20-minute call See what the audit covers

Fixed scope. Fixed fee. First report in 14 days.

Settlement tie-outBank vs ledger

Date	Reference	Bank	Ledger	State
08‑28	PAYOUT‑4471	412,880.14	412,880.14	Match
08‑28	ACH‑RET‑R01	−1,240.00	−1,240.00	Match
08‑29	PAYOUT‑4472	198,404.77	198,912.03	Break
08‑29	FEE‑PROC‑08	−9,118.62	−9,118.62	Match
07‑03	REV‑0093	—	3,506.00	63d
08‑30	PAYOUT‑4473	376,551.20	376,551.20	Match

Auto‑match rate 94.2% Open breaks 41 Oldest 63 days

Illustration, not a client file. Two of these six rows are the reason someone in your finance team works Saturdays at month end.

Symptoms

You probably recognize at least three of these

None of them look urgent on their own. Together they are the reason your close date keeps sliding and your auditor keeps asking the same question.

Month‑end close slips past day ten, every month, and nobody can say exactly which step is the bottleneck.
One person maintains the spreadsheet that ties processor payouts to the bank, and everything stops when they take PTO.
ACH returns and chargebacks get worked out of an inbox instead of a queue, so aging is invisible until it is large.
The bank, the processor and the ledger each report a different number for the same day, and reconciling them is a person, not a control.
A reversal posts to the wrong account and gets found six weeks later by accident.
Your auditor asks for a control narrative for payment operations and there is nothing written down.
Engineering has “reconciliation tooling” on the roadmap for the fourth quarter running.
You are about to add a currency, a rail or a partner bank, and nobody wants to be the one who says the current process will not hold.

Engagements

Three ways to work together, in order

Every engagement starts at 01. I do not sell a buildout to a company I have not audited, because until I have seen your files I am guessing, and you would be paying for the guess.

Payment Operations Audit

The diagnostic. Read‑only access, one closed month, structured interviews with everyone who touches money movement. You get a current‑state map, a ranked problem list and a 30/60/90 roadmap you can hand to engineering.

2 weeks · fixed fee · no system changes

$7,500flat

Reconciliation Buildout

I implement the top of the list with your finance and engineering teams: match rules, an exception queue with real aging and ownership, a documented close checklist, and the control narrative your auditor keeps asking for.

4 to 6 weeks · scoped from the audit

$25k – $45kper project

Fractional Payment Operations

I own the function on an ongoing basis: exceptions, close, processor and bank relationships, and the operating standard for new rails and markets. Until you are ready to hire a senior operator full time, or instead of it.

Monthly · typically 2 days a week

$10k – $15kper month

Pricing is deliberately below what a firm charges for the same scope. You are buying one operator with hands on the files, not a team of analysts learning your business on your budget.

The audit

What you get in fourteen days

A document your CFO can act on and your engineering lead will not dismiss. Five parts.

Current‑state money map: Every path funds take from customer authorization to settlement to payout, with the system, file and owner at each hop. Card processor reports, BAI2 or MT940 bank files, sponsor bank statements, ledger entries.
Reconciliation and control review: What matches automatically, what a person matches by hand, and what does not match at all. Aging of open breaks, plus where a break could sit undetected and for how long.
Exception inventory: Every exception type you actually generate: returns by code, chargebacks, reversals, duplicate settlements, FX rounding, partial captures. Who works each one, how long it takes, and what happens when that person is out.
Automation shortlist: Ranked by finance hours returned per engineering week spent, so the roadmap conversation stops being a matter of opinion. Includes the items you should not automate yet, and why.
30/60/90 roadmap: Sequenced, with a named owner and a definition of done for each item. Written so it survives my leaving.

What I need from you: read access to one closed month of settlement reports and bank statements, your chart of accounts, and 45 minutes each with the four or five people who touch the process. No production access, no customer PII, no code changes.

The math

What manual reconciliation costs you right now

Change the numbers to yours. This is the conversation we would have on the call anyway, so you may as well have it before we speak.

Working

Hours per month on manual reconciliation87

Cost of those hours per month$4,333

Hours returned per month52

Audit plus buildout, one time$32,500

Pays for itself in2.9 months

Recovered per year $31,200

Rough arithmetic on your figures, and deliberately conservative: it prices only labour. It does not price a delayed close, a restatement, a break nobody found, or the senior hire you postpone.

Sequence

The first two weeks, day by day

You will know exactly what is happening and when, because the schedule is the same every time.

Days 1 – 2

Access and data pullRead access to one closed month. Settlement reports, bank files, ledger export, chart of accounts. Nothing touches production.

Days 3 – 5

Interviews45 minutes each with finance, ops, and the engineer who gets pinged when a payout looks wrong. I ask what happens, not what is supposed to happen.

Days 6 – 8

Independent tie‑outI reconcile that month myself, from the outside, and record every place my numbers and yours part company.

Days 9 – 11

Exception inventory and rankingEvery exception type, its volume, its owner, its cost. Then the automation shortlist ranked by hours returned per engineering week.

Days 12 – 14

Write‑upThe map, the findings, the control review, the roadmap. Written for two audiences at once: your CFO and your engineering lead.

Day 15

Readout90 minutes with finance and engineering in the same room, which for most teams is the first time that has happened about this topic.

Fit

Worth a call, and not worth a call

Good fit

$10M to $500M revenue, 20 to 500 people, growing faster than the finance team is
Money moving through Stripe, Adyen, Modern Treasury, a sponsor bank or a combination of all four
A finance team of two to ten people, at least one of whom reconciles by hand
Preparing for an audit, a new market, a new rail or a diligence process
Recently funded, with budget for a fix but not for four more headcount

Poor fit

Pre‑revenue, or not yet moving money at volume. There is nothing to reconcile yet
Looking for a full‑time hire. Hire one. I will help you write the scorecard if it is useful
Hoping to buy a tool rather than fix a process. Tools sit on top of the process, and yours is the problem
Wanting a named firm on the invoice for the sake of the name

Who

One operator, hands on the files

I have spent my career inside payments and banking operations: settlement and clearing, processor and sponsor bank relationships, reconciliation build‑outs, and the seam between finance and engineering where most of this actually breaks.

I have been the person working the exception queue at nine in the evening on the last day of the month. I have been the person who had to explain to a controller why the bank and the ledger disagreed by four hundred dollars and neither side was wrong. That is the whole qualification, and it is the reason I can tell in one call whether your problem is a matching rule, a data gap or an ownership gap.

I work alone, on a small number of engagements at a time, which is why the schedule above is firm and why I say no to work that is not a fit.

Questions

The four I always get

Do you need production access?

No. The audit runs on exported files: settlement reports, bank statements, a ledger export, a chart of accounts. No production access, no write access, no customer PII. If your security team wants to review the list before we start, send it to them first.

What if you find nothing?

Then you have a written current‑state map, a control narrative and a documented match rate, which is exactly what your auditor and your next diligence process will ask for and what almost nobody has. That has value on its own. It has also never happened.

Do you work with our engineers or around them?

With them, and the readout is designed for it. Engineering usually knows the reconciliation problem is real and has been unable to get it prioritized against revenue work. A ranked list with hours returned per engineering week is the argument they have been missing.

Why is this cheaper than the firm we spoke to?

Because a firm has to staff a team, and the team has to learn your business at your expense before anyone is useful. The scope here is narrow on purpose, I do the work myself, and I would rather be the person you call three times over two years than the invoice you regret once.

Next step

Twenty minutes, and you will know whether this is worth doing.

Bring your close calendar and a rough sense of your match rate. If there is nothing here for you, I will say so on the call and we will both save a month.

Book a 20-minute call edgar@tieoutops.com