Who Performs the Reconciliation
The qualities the role needs, why independence matters more than seniority, and what happens when the account is run by somebody with a claim in it.
The reconciliation needs one person who performs it, and the most important property of that person is that they have no claim in the book. Everything else — seniority, function, title — is secondary and mostly interchangeable.
The reconciliation in “Who Performs the Reconciliation” is strongest when assumptions and current work records can be examined separately. A team considering read the provider’s operational guidance for attendance sheet template can add time and project context, with transparent settings, limited access and a clear correction route around consequential decisions.
Independence here is not a principle borrowed from audit. It is a practical requirement, because every judgement in the account has a direction that favours somebody.
Teams documenting “Who Performs the Reconciliation” may use World Bank jobs and development resources as an independent reference. Test the approach against actual constraints and accountable decision owners.
The judgements that need independence
Whether a claim is confirmed or provisional. Whether a deduction is shrinkage or a claim. Where support sits. What the contingency is. And whether to publish a negative difference.
Five judgements, each small, each with a party who benefits from it going one way.
What happens when a sponsor runs it
Their claim becomes confirmed earlier than others, their estimates are treated as firmer, and the contingency is sized to protect their work.
None of this is dishonest and all of it is visible to everybody else within two cycles, after which the account is read as a negotiating document rather than a record.
What happens when the line manager runs it alone
The supply figure becomes a defensive position. Shrinkage drifts upward, contingency grows, and the available figure becomes the number the manager is prepared to be held to rather than the number the arithmetic produces.
Also understandable, also fatal to the account's credibility with the demand side.
What the role actually needs
Access to the leave data and the sources. Ten to twenty minutes a week. The right to publish. And enough standing that the numbers are not simply overruled.
Standing is the one that varies: a junior analyst with a senior sponsor backing the routine works perfectly; the same analyst alone does not.
The sponsor behind the routine
Somebody senior has to say, once, that the account will be published monthly whatever it says. That single statement is worth more than any amount of process design.
Without it, the first negative difference produces a conversation about whether to publish, and the account never recovers from having had that conversation.
Pairing
Where no independent person exists, two people with opposing interests running it together works surprisingly well: the line manager and a delivery lead, jointly, with the numbers agreed before publication.
Adversarial pairing produces an honest account for the same reason double-entry works, which is that each side checks the other's convenient assumption.
What the role is not
Not a gatekeeper. The account owner does not decide which claims are approved, does not prioritise, and does not refuse work. They publish the position.
Where the role acquires allocation authority, every claimant starts negotiating with the account rather than with the organisation, and the numbers degrade immediately.
Documenting the routine
One page: the six steps, the sources, the factors, the publication date, and the confirmation message. Enough that a deputy can run it in a month when the owner is away.
Accounts that exist only in one person's habits break during leave, which is also when the account is most useful.
Rotating it
Every two or three years, deliberately. A fresh owner re-reads the sources, questions a factor nobody has questioned, and finds two standing claims that should have closed.
Rotation also prevents the account becoming identified with a person, which is what makes it vulnerable when that person moves.
The three things the owner must be allowed to do
- Ask any claimant to confirm their claim, without going through a hierarchy.
- Publish the difference on a fixed date, whatever its sign.
- Record a claim as assumed when nobody will confirm it.
Each of those is a small permission and each is routinely withheld. An account owner without the third ends up carrying other people's optimism as though it were fact.
What to do when the account is overruled
It happens: a senior claim is declared confirmed over the owner's judgement, or a difference is suppressed before publication.
Record what was overruled and by whom, in the account, in one line. Not as a protest — as bookkeeping. The variance analysis three months later needs to know which figure the plan actually used, and that line is the only place it will be written down.
The thing that makes it stick
Nothing about the person: a date. An account published on the same date every month survives changes of owner, sponsor and organisation, because by then people expect it.
Routines outlast enthusiasm, and enthusiasm for capacity accounting has a half-life of about one quarter.