“Garbage in-garbage out” is a phrase you’ve heard many times. It’s usually said as if it’s obviously and always true. “If you guys upstream can’t produce clean data, how do you expect my process, my system, to give usable outputs.”
But does it have to be true? I don’t think so. GIGO shouldn’t be the lame excuse that let’s your system continue to fail. You should expect more. Software that’s so dumb that it gives up at the first hurdle is just not trying hard enough. I see no reason why systems shouldn’t try to do a bit of “garbage recycling” and aim to make something good out of imperfect inputs.
That’s the promise of the Text Search match in Isolist, and now also in ReconSilo.
A Text Search match is a type of sub-string match, where the text in field A is required to match part of the text in field B. However, rather than requiring precise alignment of the substring in field B, a Text Search match allows for defects and inconsistencies. It accepts that the data presented for reconciliation might not be consistently arranged, and tries to find field A’s text anywhere within the text of B.
Text Search match type matches a code at any position in the opposite field.
This is often valuable when some of the data you must reconcile has been hand-typed, for example in a descriptive field. ReconSilo can now use that data to identify matching records automatically, which otherwise would have to be identified by you.
There are quite a number of data reconciliation products on the market. Some aim to be major components of global businesses and have very high price tags prices that can’t even be mentioned. Others are more modest, focusing on the ubiquitous “bank reconciliation” process carried out by most organisations. I believe there’s room for another, so today I’m announcing … (drum roll) … ReconSilo.
ReconSilo will join Isolist as my second reconciliation application. It’s an entirely new and substantially bigger tool, providing many of the full reconciliation process features that just don’t fit inside of Isolist. Features such as carrying forward unmatched records, manual editing of matches, capacity to handle hundreds of thousands of records and full activity logging are all new and put ReconSilo into a different class.
Creating a new application from scratch meant I could build something that I’m passionate about: software that’s a joy to use. Too many applications, especially in the business world, look and feel just as they did way back in the the early 90s. To use them you must scrute the inscrutable icons on the tool-bar, or else wade through endless menus and dialog boxes to accomplish every single task. And they force users to convert their mental understanding of the task they need to perform into the different representation of that task as implemented by the software. Working this way is just not pleasant.
Software that works well, with a high quality, easy-to-use interface, is inevitably more costly to create but will pay off with much stronger user acceptance. Not only do I want to create software that I want to use, but I want lots of you to want to use it too.
Of course, regardless of how it looks and feels, an application must be capable of doing the job required. So the guiding principles in ReconSilo’s development are:
- Be flexible and powerful enough to complete all of your reconciliations
- Be as simple and engaging to use as possible with a rich, visual display
The pre-release version of ReconSilo 1.0 is now available and the final release is only weeks away. You can try it out for free. If you do, I’d love to hear your thoughts.