Automating Claims Reconciliation for a Federal Bankruptcy Trustee

A federal Chapter 13 trustee's office reconciled creditor claims by hand, cross-checking internal case records against the court's official claims register line by line. The two sources used different formats and naming conventions, so every comparison required human interpretation.

Because the output feeds court filings, the stakes were not administrative. A single missed discrepancy carried real consequences, which meant the review could never be rushed — only endured.

We built a custom desktop application that reconciles claims across both sources automatically, matching creditor names and amounts intelligently despite the formatting differences between the documents, and surfacing only the items that genuinely need a decision.

The tool was built on a strict principle: where it is uncertain, it flags for review rather than guessing. It will never quietly resolve an ambiguity in order to look more capable. The final determination always stays with the trustee.

A manual, multi-hour reconciliation became a fast, repeatable process. Staff now review a short list of flagged exceptions instead of reading every line of both documents.

The change is as much about risk as about time: the review is now systematic rather than dependent on sustained human attention across hundreds of rows, which substantially reduces the chance of a missed discrepancy reaching a filing.