Case Study - ReconArt enables full automation of account reconciliation in travel & hospitality for Gathern

Client profile: Gathern – the leading vacation rental marketplace in Saudi Arabia

Gathern is a P2P marketplace for vacation rentals and the first business of its kind licensed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

In the seven years after its launch in 2017, Gathern has grown threefold. The company is well aligned with the strategic national focus on domestic, year-round tourism and ready to meet the surging consumer demand for local travel.

The challenge: searching for the reconciliation software to streamline transaction matching and support growth

Gathern’s rapid growth across platform registrations, bookings, and payment options has led to a massive surge in transaction volume. The finance team has been struggling to reconcile over a million transactions monthly, a number expected to double within the following year.

To maintain operational efficiency in this fast-paced environment, Gathern urgently needed to automate its reconciliation processes. They aimed for an automated transaction matching and account reconciliation system capable of handling diverse processes, data sources, and matching requirements.

The primary goal was to improve reconciliation between payment gateway data, bank statements, and internal sales records, and subsequently, reconciling the payouts to the hosts and commissions.

Key software capabilities that were addressed in the requirements were:

• sweeping process automation that would deliver more speed and precision
• full control over data flows with a strong emphasis on protection of data privacy
• tailored matching operations and streamlined exceptions management demanding limited human supervision
• seamless integration with client infrastructure and existing proprietary systems

The solution: scalable and efficient bank and payment gateway reconciliations with ReconArt

Following a successful POC, independent references, and an onsite visit, Gathern selected ReconArt, a platform that stands out for its flexibility, rich functionality, and cost efficiency, to streamline their credit card, GL, and bank reconciliation processes.

ReconArt integrates securely and directly with unlimited data sources, including bank feeds, ERPs, accounting modules, BI tools, and reservation systems. Its MS Dynamics API integration also facilitated Gathern’s planned ERP migration.

Through the ReconArt data orchestration layer, Gathern exercise fully automated control on file imports. The powerful enrichment and transformation functionality enables selective import of data columns relevant for the matching itself, keeping sensitive client data out. All file formats included in the reconciliation – Excel, CSV, MT940 – are supported at no additional cost.

ReconArt manages the monthly 3-way reconciliation between the bank, the GL, and the payment service providers like Tamara, Tabby, or PayFort. The matching is performed by multiple criteria and fully auditable logic for incontestable results. The configurable sets of rules handle complex one-to-many or many-to-many relationships and captures subtle data patterns easily.

ReconArt’s exceptions management functionality allows automating the classifications of unmatched items, configuring auto resolve rules within specific tolerances, FX differences / fee calculations, and expected timing delays. The system centralizes operations like delegated investigation, ageing tracking, near-real time reporting, or export to specified destinations. 

Gathern opted for ReconArt’s flexible deployment option (hosted or in-house), allowing them to balance high IT infrastructure and support costs, maintaining enterprise-level security to ensure data integrity and availability.

Benefits & results: best practice reconciliation processes and future-proof finance operations

Today Gathern reconcile their accounts faster and much more efficiently. Their leverage is a solution which brings all reconciliation workflows, financial data, and supporting documentation under one roof, in a secure, fully automated environment. 

Gathern’s expert team drive continuous improvement of their reconciliation processes independently, leveraging ReconArt’s scalable SaaS reconciliation technology and travel & hospitality industry expertise to support future growth.