AUTOMATED ACCOUNT RECONCILIATION METHOD

Disclosed is a generalized method for automated account reconciliation capable of matching transactions in one accounting dataset to transactions in another accounting dataset with little initial data preparation. The method is highly flexible in that it does not require source data in a particular format, can accept both structured and unstructured (e.g. descriptive text) data as input, is not domain- or language-dependent, and requires little to no training or user-provided heuristics. The method is also adjustable depending on a user's tolerance of error. Based on probability and information theory, computational linguistics, and statistics, the method can complete accounting reconciliation problems in significantly less time than is possible manually, and with just as high accuracy. Especially for large reconciliation problems, the method can save an overwhelming portion of the cost associated with this kind of task in the past.