Reconcile expenses: pair receipts with what your bank actually paid

Once your bank account is connected, Routario has both halves of every purchase: the money that left your account, and the receipts and invoices you’ve uploaded. Reconciling means pairing them up — so that at the end of the month you can tell your accountant, with confidence, that every payment is either backed by a document or doesn’t need one.

This page explains how that pairing works, why it’s cautious rather than clever, and what your options are when a payment doesn’t fit the obvious shape.

The two questions every payment answers

Every outgoing payment gets two independent answers:

Company or personal? A business expense, or money that has nothing to do with the company (a personal card slip on a shared account, a reimbursement). Personal payments leave the expense list entirely — they don’t need a receipt because they’re not a cost of the business.
Is there a document for it? A payment can be matched to a receipt or invoice, waiting for one, or explicitly marked as never needing one (more on that below).

You set the first by clicking the movement and choosing Company or Personal. The second is mostly automatic — Routario proposes a match when it finds one — but you always have the final word.

How Routario proposes a match

For every outgoing payment without a document yet, Routario looks at your open receipts and invoices and asks: does one of these settle this payment?

Same currency — the one your bank says it charged. A CZK payment is compared against CZK documents, a EUR payment against EUR documents. Routario never converts one currency into another to find a match: two unrelated numbers in different currencies can look close by coincidence, and a match built on a coincidence is worse than none.

What it does use is the amount your bank itself states. When you pay a EUR invoice with a CZK card, the bank line usually says what was charged in the original currency — Fio ends it with ”…, částka 8.10 EUR”. Routario reads that figure, so the 201,80 CZK payment is compared with your EUR documents at 8,10 EUR and pairs with the 8,10 EUR invoice exactly, no exchange rate involved.

The amount does most of the work — but only when it’s exact. If a document’s total matches the payment to the cent, that’s proposed on its own merit, even if the supplier name on the payment looks nothing like the supplier on the document. That sounds looser than it is: a card payment often names the payment processor, not the shop you actually bought from (your bank statement might say “PAYMENTS & SERVICES” for a restaurant bill, for instance) — so requiring the names to match would silently break exactly the receipts you’re most likely to want auto-matched.

If the amount is not exact, the supplier name has to agree before Routario will suggest anything. An almost-matching amount between two payments that plainly went to different companies is treated as a coincidence, not a lead — it stays unmatched rather than becoming a wrong guess you have to notice and undo.

One payment can settle two documents. Two train tickets bought in one go arrive as two receipts and one card payment. When a payment has no single document of its own, Routario looks for two open documents whose amounts add up to it exactly — 614 + 694 for a 1 308 payment — and proposes both together. Only an exact sum counts, and never more than two documents.

A variable symbol you’ve declared always wins. If a payment carries a variable symbol (VS) that also appears on a document, that pairing is proposed immediately, regardless of amount or name — you told Routario what that number means, and a declared fact outranks anything inferred.

Accepting, rejecting, and the numbers that don’t quite match

Open a payment and, if Routario has a candidate, you’ll see it under Document with an Accept match button. Click it and the two are linked. If it’s wrong, Not a match dismisses the suggestion — Routario won’t propose that same pairing again.

Some accepted matches carry a note about the gap between the document and what was actually paid:

Paying a little more than the document says — a tip, a round-up at the terminal — is normal, and reads as a benign note rather than a problem.
Paying less than the document says never reads as fine, however small the difference. It usually means the wrong document, a partial payment, or a credit note, and Routario flags it rather than nodding it through.

When a payment shouldn’t need a document at all

Some payments are the same every month by contract, not because anyone issued paperwork for that specific transfer — your own salary, a loan instalment, insurance, moving money between your own accounts to convert currency. For these, open the payment and use Standing payment → No document expected, giving it a short label like “Salary” or “EUR→CZK conversion”.

Do this once and every future payment matching the same account or variable symbol recognises itself automatically — it won’t sit in your review queue asking for a receipt that will never exist.

Receipts that were uploaded but never made it onto the books

Receipts and invoices can reach Routario more than one way — through the expense workflow directly, or dropped into Memory like any other file. A file that arrives through Memory is stored and searchable, but on its own it isn’t yet an expense: nobody has told Routario what it cost or when.

When your workspace runs an Expenses Job, that catching up happens on its own. Each supplier invoice or receipt that lands in Memory — from your mailbox or an upload — is read with the Job’s invoice recipe and put on the books as a draft: supplier, number, dates, currency and totals filled in, the file attached. Confirming a draft is still yours to do. A document the Job isn’t sure about becomes a question in your Inbox instead, with the reason on the card:

a detail it couldn’t read confidently, or a date or total it couldn’t make sense of;
numbers that don’t add up, or a date that can’t be right — issued after it arrived, or months before;
a proforma, a cancelled document or a credit note;
a possible duplicate — the same purchase already on the books as an invoice and now arriving as a receipt, say. Another copy of the very same document (the same supplier’s number) is recognised and not filed twice.

Confirming the card files it as read, corrections included.

The Documents tab’s Unfiled view is where anything else catches up. Each row is a stored file with one action, Put on the books. For a file the Job has already read, that files the draft from its reading; for one nobody has read, it creates an empty draft for you to fill in. Routario won’t guess those numbers on your behalf; a document with no date can’t be placed in the right filing period, so confirming is blocked until it has one.

A receipt in a currency your bank didn’t actually charge

A foreign invoice usually pairs on its own: the bank states the amount in the invoice’s currency and Routario matches on that (see How Routario proposes a match). When you accept such a pair, the invoice counts as settled at its own amount, in its own currency.

It won’t pair when the bank states nothing in the invoice’s currency — typically because the merchant charged you in yours, so a USD subscription arrives as “částka 261.31 CZK”. Routario has no figure to compare the invoice with and won’t guess one from an exchange rate.

In that case record the document at what your bank actually charged — the CZK amount and CZK as the currency, with a note that the underlying invoice was issued in USD. Once the document reflects the real charge, it matches like any other exact pair.

Where to go next

Connect your bank accounts (Fio) — the transactions this page reconciles against.
Memory: what Routario remembers — where uploaded receipts and invoices live before they’re filed.
Issue invoices (Fakturoid / iDoklad) — the other half of your books: money coming in.