Why bank reconciliation drags on
A busy travel agency's bank statement can carry hundreds of lines a month — customer payments, supplier debits, refunds, bank charges — and matching each one against the correct booking or invoice by hand is exactly the kind of repetitive, detail-heavy work that eats days rather than hours.
What makes it slow specifically
The slowest part usually isn't the matching that works cleanly — it's chasing the handful of lines that don't obviously match anything, which requires someone to manually search through booking records to work out what a given payment was actually for.
Automated matching, with a safety net
The realistic goal isn't 100% automated matching — it's automating the clear majority (statement lines that obviously correspond to a known invoice or bill) and routing the genuinely ambiguous ones to a suspense account for a human to resolve, rather than making a human check every single line regardless of how obvious the match is.
How Muhasib speeds this up
Muhasib automatically matches bank statement lines against open invoices and bills, with a suspense account for anything that needs manual review — turning reconciliation into a quick check of the exceptions, not a full manual pass through every transaction.