At a glance

‍

1. Spreadsheets

Still the go-to for lots of businesses tackling statement reconciliation, and fair enough, it works well if you've only a handful of suppliers to reconcile each month. It's free to use, you don't have to involve procurement and it's accessible to the whole team.

However, it gets harder as your supplier list grows. Every statement is reconciled by hand, so the time involved goes up with each supplier you add. A change in a supplier's statement format can break the template, and the only audit trail is whatever version history your spreadsheet tool keeps.

Best for: businesses with low supplier volumes, or putting a process in place for the first time.

Watch out for: the tipping point, when reconciliation starts taking up a chunk of someone's week. That's the time to look at dedicated software.

2. SAP (native)

SAP is strong at matching within your own books. It checks purchase orders, goods receipts and invoices against each other (three-way matching), and on S/4HANA, automatic clearing rules handle a lot of routine matches without anyone stepping in.

What it doesn't do is check your records against your supplier's. There's no built-in way to import a supplier statement and match it line by line against what's posted in SAP. That comparison usually happens outside SAP, in an exported spreadsheet. Arco and Grundfos, both large SAP users, were working this way before they automated statement reconciliation with Open ECX.

Best for: SAP users who aren't ready to add a separate tool.

Watch out for: the statement check itself is still manual. SAP gives you cleaner data to start from, but someone still has to compare it line by line.

3. Microsoft Dynamics (native)

Dynamics, whether you're on Business Central, Dynamics 365 Finance or an older AX or NAV setup, handles vendor ledgers and payment history well on its own terms. Statement reconciliation isn't one of those terms.

There's no built-in way to import a supplier's PDF or Excel statement and match it against what's already posted. So the comparison happens by hand, usually in a spreadsheet, as a separate task alongside the day-to-day.

Best for: businesses on Dynamics with a short supplier list, or teams mapping out the manual process before deciding whether to automate it.

Watch out for: multi-entity setups. Each entity has its own supplier statements to reconcile, so the manual work multiplies quickly.

4. Sage (native)

Sage 200 keeps a clean purchase ledger, but it wasn't built to check that ledger against a supplier's statement. Reconciliation means pulling both sides into a spreadsheet and going through them line by line.

For businesses that have automated other parts of accounts payable, this can end up as one of the last manual jobs left, which is often when it starts to stand out.

Best for: smaller businesses on Sage 200 with a short supplier list.

Watch out for: the time it takes. Every statement is checked by hand, every month, so the hours add up.

5. BEST

BEST is a South African company that builds SAP-certified add-on modules for vendor and general ledger reconciliation. Its Vendor Recons module runs inside your existing SAP environment rather than as a separate platform.

Statements can arrive as PDF, Excel, EDI, IDoc or even paper. An OCR engine extracts the data, then BEST matches it against what's posted in SAP.

Best for: SAP users who want reconciliation inside SAP rather than in a separate tool.

Watch out for: it only works with SAP, so it's not an option on any other ERP.

6. StatementSYNC

StatementSYNC is a US product from SAS, a recovery audit firm. At its core, it does the same job as the other tools on this list: matching supplier statements against your ledger. The difference is the approach. It's built around recovery audit (reviewing past payments to find and recover money lost to duplicate payments or missed credits) and designed for retail and healthcare.

It's a good example of how differently this market has developed in the US. For a US retail or healthcare business, it's worth a look. For a UK finance team, it's more useful as a reference point than a shortlist candidate.

Best for: US retail and healthcare businesses running recovery audit programmes.

Watch out for: it's built around US audit practices, so it isn't designed with UK audit or compliance requirements in mind.

7. ReconArt

ReconArt is a broader reconciliation platform. Bank, credit card, position, trade and supplier statement reconciliation all sit under one roof, built around N-way matching that compares three or more data sources at once. More than 30 report templates come built in, which helps if your finance team wants standardised reporting on supplier spend and settlement times without building it from scratch.

That breadth is the appeal. The trade-off is focus: a platform built to cover many types of reconciliation is a different proposition to one built around supplier statements alone.

Best for: teams that want one platform covering several reconciliation types, not just supplier statements.

Watch out for: less depth on the supplier statement workflow than a specialist tool.

8. Open ECX

Open ECX Statement Reconciliation is built for businesses already running an ERP, whether that's SAP, Dynamics, Sage, NetSuite or something else. It works alongside your existing ERP and EDI connections, without asking you to replace what's already working.

It handles statements in whatever format suppliers send them: PDF, Excel, EDI or paper. Open ECX is also a recognised Peppol Access Point already connecting 17,000+ businesses, which matters if the UK's 2029 e-invoicing mandate is anywhere on your radar.

This isn't a full financial close suite, and it isn't trying to be. It's built to solve one problem, statement reconciliation.

Best for: UK mid-market businesses with an existing ERP that want to automate statement reconciliation without a platform migration.

Watch out for: if you need one platform covering financial close, bank reconciliation and consolidation reporting too, that's a different category of tool.

What next?

For more on what statement reconciliation involves, see What Is Supplier Statement Reconciliation? and How Supplier Statement Matching Works. For the numbers behind the case for automating it, Automated Supplier Statement Reconciliation: 8 Benefits That Pay for the Software covers that in detail.

Want to see how Open ECX handles this for a business running your ERP? Get in touch and we'll walk you through it.