Licensed property management agencies can spend days each month matching trust account bank lines to rent and owner payments by hand. A nightly reconciliation auto-clears matches and flags exceptions to the bookkeeper by morning, typically cutting month-end close to one day.
Typical results
1 day
Month-end close
96%
Lines auto-matched
12 hrs/wk
Reconciliation time saved
0
Findings in last trust audit
Figures reflect typical results for this kind of automation.
The challenge
Trust accounting leaves no room for error — regulators audit every shekel held on behalf of owners and tenants. Yet the agency's bookkeeper matched hundreds of bank lines to the rent ledger manually, in spreadsheets, days behind the feed. Month-end close dragged for four days, exceptions surfaced weeks late, and every audit season meant overtime and anxiety.
Before and after
Month-end close
−75%Manual reconciliation
−86%Exception resolution
−95%The automation
Every night at 2am, a Make scenario pulls the day's trust account bank feed and matches each line against the rent ledger and scheduled owner disbursements — by amount, reference, tenant, and property. Clean matches are cleared and posted automatically, around ninety-six percent of lines. The rest land in a categorized exception queue — short payments, unknown deposits, duplicates — that the bookkeeper finds prioritized in her inbox each morning.
How it works
- 01
Night run
At 2am the flow pulls the day's bank feed for every trust account.
- 02
Match
Each line is matched against the rent ledger and scheduled owner disbursements by amount, reference, and tenant.
- 03
Auto-clear
Clean matches — about ninety-six percent of lines — are cleared and posted automatically.
- 04
Flag
Short payments, unknown deposits, and duplicates land in a categorized exception queue.
- 05
Morning brief
The bookkeeper starts the day with a short, prioritized exception list — the rest is already done.
Starts from
- Trust account bank feed
- Rent ledger & disbursements
Delivers
- Matched lines auto-cleared
- Exceptions flagged & categorized
- Morning brief to bookkeeper
The impact
Month-end close typically drops from four days to one, and reconciliation work shrinks from fourteen hours a week to two. Exceptions are handled the morning after they occur instead of weeks later, and trust audits become routine because every line already has a clean, documented match.
Questions about this automation
How are bank lines matched to the ledger?
Every night the flow pulls the day's bank feed for each trust account and compares each line with the rent ledger and scheduled owner disbursements. It matches on amount, payment reference, tenant and property. Lines that match cleanly are cleared and posted automatically, which typically covers the large majority of transactions.
What happens to lines that do not match?
They go into an exception queue sorted by category, such as short payments, unknown deposits and duplicates. The bookkeeper receives a prioritized morning brief listing those exceptions, resolves them, and each resolution is recorded against its bank line, so the audit trail stays complete.
What does an agency need to get started?
Access to the trust account bank feeds, a rent ledger and disbursement schedule the automation can read, and the matching rules the bookkeeper already uses. The scenario runs in Make. This is a multi-step build, usually rolled out in stages, starting with matching and adding the exception queue after.