Suggest Configuration and Match Criteria

What is Suggest?

Suggest is a process which runs in the background and makes suggestions to the users about possible matches. Users can then decide to accept (reconcile) or reject the suggestions. It works by looking at all reference fields and finding whole or partial word matches across multiple transactions in all the reference fields. It differs from auto recon rules because you don't have to specify what reference field to look into, to find the match. You also don't have to write regex or sql queries to extract a partial string from a word. Suggest does it for you. Suggest always matches on exact amount and additionally a date range can be specified

Configuring Suggest

Note: You need to be a Site Administrator to Configure Suggest

If you do an upgrade of Bank Recon, you need to include the following keys in the web.config and processservice configuration files.

appSettings section of web.config:

service section of App.config of ProcessService:

The Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator needs to be installed on the web server and database server for Suggest to run.

Suggest runs on a secondary process thread. It runs continually if activated, adding and removing suggestions as other reconciliations are done or new data is imported. If another process is running (Auto Recon, Cashbook Import), the suggest process service will stop to ensure it does not use processing power the other thread needs. The first time Suggest is run, it populates a mater dictionary of common words and names which may be useful for matching. This is a resource intensive process so it is recommended that Suggest is switched on for the first time outside of core business hours.

There is a new Menu Item under the User Group Setup, 'Suggest Reconciliation', which will need to be ticked for the required user groups. These groups will most likely be the same groups that can do Manual Recon.

Suggest Configuration

Navigate to Setup>Site Configuration>Suggest Configuration>General Configuration

The Settings as displayed below are the default settings for Suggest. They should work for MOST Server setups. Check the Active box and click Save. If you experience performance issues, decrease the chunk size. Once suggest has run for the most recent items in the database, you can increase the Number of Days to be Processed to try return Suggestions for older transactions. It is not recommended that you change the Word Comparison Lengths. If you have a large amount of unreconciled transactions you can increase the Cut-off Density to include more 'Words for Matching'.

Match Criteria

Navigate to Setup>Site Configuration>Suggest Configuration>Match Criteria. The criteria below ship as standard. You can edit and delete these as required. Additional criteria can be added by clicking on 'Add New Criteria'.

Comparison Types:

1. ExactMatch - Whole words (of at least 3 characters or the length specified in the configuration) common to all Cashbook and Bank Transactions must be found

2. PartialMatch - a whole world (of at least 4 characters or the length specified in the configuration) in one of the transactions will match to a partial word in the other transactions (eg Smith on the cashbook with match to GSmith (no spaces) on the Bank)

3. AmountMatch - no common whole or partial words are found. The amounts are equal (multiples of 10 will not match)

Day Range: Specifies the date difference between transactions to consider for the match. A larger date range will suggest matches between a larger group of transactions.

Sequence: Order in which the criteria are applied. Criteria which will return 'stricter' suggestions should be run first.

Frequent Key Selector:

This is the master dictionary. All words are listed here and whether they are used for matching or not as well as why they are in the specific state. Users can add and remove words from the Suggest screen so there should not be many reasons to use this screen. If required, the status of particular words can be changed to use them for matching or not.