Commission statement reconciliation: why fiduciaries lose four hours per client per month.
Almost every fiduciary or accounting firm we have spoken to in 2026 runs the same recurring back-office workflow on behalf of self-employed sales agents, brokers, and freelance consultants. The client receives monthly commission statements from one or more principals. The fiduciary has to turn those statements into a clean annual reconciliation that ties to the invoices the client has issued and the VAT they have to remit. This post is the version of that workflow we have observed in detail over the past six months, with the numbers that explain why it takes the time it does.
If you run this workflow at scale and the numbers below feel familiar, this is the job our engine was pointed at first, and the one it is productized around.
01The client and the statement
The typical client here is a self-employed sales agent or apporteur d'affaires. In Belgium they are often registered as a sole trader or a small SRL. In France the legal form is usually a SASU or a profession libérale. In Switzerland it is often an indépendant under contract with one or several principals. Across all three countries, the worker invoices a principal each month for commissions earned, and the principal sends a corresponding commission statement.
The principals look familiar across the segment. Telecom operators (Proximus, Orange, Telenet, Sunrise, Salt, Yol). Insurance brokers and intermediaries (AXA distribution partnerships, broker networks aggregating dozens of carriers). Financial services intermediaries (mortgage brokers, private banking introducers). Industrial sales channels (B2B reseller programs, distribution partnerships).
A commission statement from one of these principals is a PDF with somewhere between twenty and several hundred line items. Each line corresponds to a sale or a recurring contract: a customer name (or anonymised customer ID), a product or contract reference, a base amount, a commission rate, a calculated commission, and one or more flags (claw-back risk, retention bonus, gross-up). The statement also carries a summary block, monthly totals by product family, and a payment instruction.
02What the fiduciary has to produce
At month end and year end, the fiduciary has to produce three outputs for the client:
- A reconciliation between the commission statements the client received and the invoices the client issued to the principal. Off-by-one differences (a sale that landed in the wrong period, a claw-back that came back as a credit note) need to be flagged and either booked or queried with the principal.
- An annual income statement broken down by principal, product family, and where applicable customer segment. This is what the client uses to file their personal or corporate income tax return.
- A VAT reconciliation. In the Belgian and French cases, commission income is typically VAT-taxable and the agent has to remit VAT quarterly. The fiduciary verifies that the VAT on the commission invoices the client issued ties to the VAT reported on the principal-side commission statements.
None of this is difficult work. All of it is repetitive, careful, and unforgiving of small errors that compound over the year.
03The four-hour number
Across the fiduciary firms we have interviewed, the time-per-client-per-month for this workflow centres on three to five hours depending on the client's complexity. We have used four hours as the round number in conversation and it has not been pushed back on. The composition is roughly:
| Task | Time / month | Why it takes that long |
|---|---|---|
| Reading and re-typing the statement into Excel | 60 to 120 min | Each line item, manually. Some principals provide CSV alongside the PDF; many do not, or the CSV format changes between months. |
| Tying statement lines to invoice lines | 30 to 60 min | Customer IDs do not always match between the principal's system and the client's invoicing tool. Period boundaries differ. Manual reconciliation. |
| Handling claw-backs and credit notes | 15 to 30 min | Negative line items from a previous period need to be matched to the original sale and the correct accounting period. |
| VAT reconciliation | 20 to 40 min | Confirming the VAT rate applied per line, especially when principals operate in mixed jurisdictions. |
| Building the monthly summary the client signs off | 15 to 30 min | Pivot tables, formatting, sometimes a brief written commentary on movements. |
Four hours times twelve months is forty-eight hours per client per year. At a senior fiduciary billing rate of €80 to €120 per hour, that is between €3,800 and €5,800 of billable time per client per year, depending on the firm and the client mix. For a fiduciary running this workflow on a hundred apporteur clients, that is somewhere between €380,000 and €580,000 of capacity locked in retyping numbers from PDFs.
The cost is not the principal pain point. The pain point is that the workflow does not scale. Adding clients means adding hours linearly. The senior staff who could be doing tax planning, advisory work, or signing-off on consolidated accounts are instead reading line items off a PDF and typing them into a spreadsheet.
04Where automation has historically failed
Fiduciary firms are not unaware of the problem. Most have tried at least one of the following over the past five years:
Generic OCR
Tools like Adobe Acrobat OCR, ABBYY, or Tesseract can read the text off the PDF. They do not know what to do with it. The output is unstructured text or a noisy CSV with no notion of which fields are line items, headers, or summary totals. The fiduciary still has to read it and re-type the numbers.
Per-principal scripts
A larger firm with internal engineering capacity can write parsers for the three or four principals their clients work with most often. The parsers work until the principal changes the PDF template, which they do without notice. Maintenance cost compounds. We have seen two firms abandon this approach inside eighteen months.
"Send us your CSV" requests
Some principals will provide CSV on request. Some will not. Some will provide it in different shapes for different agent tiers. We have seen fiduciaries spend more time chasing principals for CSV than they would have spent re-typing the PDF.
Off-the-shelf accounting software
Accounting platforms (Xero, Pennylane, Yuki, Sage) handle the books once the data is in. They are not built to read the statement that the data needs to come from. The fiduciary is back to manual input.
05What the engine actually does
One grounded extraction engine runs behind every output we produce; the report on top is a template. The architecture is the same either way: the local language model reads the PDF, identifies the structural sections, extracts every line item with its surrounding context, and produces a structured output where every figure is traced back to the page and row it came from. The reviewer adjudicates ambiguities and signs off.
For a typical commission statement, the output is an Excel workbook with three sheets:
- Line items. One row per statement line, with customer ID, product reference, base amount, commission rate, gross commission, claw-back flag, VAT, net commission, and a column with the source-page reference from the original PDF.
- Reconciliation. The same line items joined against the client's issued invoices, with a status column flagging matched, missing, or surplus rows for the fiduciary to query.
- Summary. Pivot of net commission by principal, product family, and period, in the shape the fiduciary already presents to the client.
The audit chain that makes the CSRD output defensible is the same one that makes the commission output defensible. If the client or principal queries a figure two years later, the reviewer can pull up the source PDF and the row that produced it without retracing the workflow.
06What it changes for the fiduciary
The reduction in time-per-client-per-month is the obvious benefit, and we are honest that the real-world improvement depends heavily on the principal's PDF quality. In our pilots so far, the four-hour-per-client-per-month baseline drops to roughly one hour, almost all of it on the reviewer adjudicating edge cases (claw-backs that span periods, VAT rate changes mid-statement, customer-ID mismatches that need human judgement). The rest happens without keystrokes.
For a hundred-client fiduciary firm, that is roughly 3,600 senior hours freed per year. The interesting question is what the firm chooses to do with those hours. The options we have seen discussed are:
- Add more clients without adding headcount.
- Move senior staff to advisory work at higher billable rates.
- Reduce the per-client billable hours and pass some of the savings to the client to lock in retention.
- Take on a category of small-revenue independents that were previously unprofitable to serve.
The fourth option is the one that interests us most. The apporteur d'affaires segment is large, growing, and underserved. A fiduciary firm that can serve a €30,000-a-year freelancer profitably opens a market that competitors using manual reconciliation cannot reach.
07What we have shipped, and what we have not
The commission-reconciliation output template is available today on Attera. The Excel workbook structure described above is the canonical output; we adapt the column set to the principals a specific firm works with. The same security posture applies as for CSRD: documents are processed on hardware we operate in Belgium, no third-party LLM provider sees the content, full sub-processor list is one entry long (see the security page).
What we have not shipped yet:
- Direct integrations with the accounting platforms. We are not building them: upload-only is the design, not a gap, and the Excel output is the handoff. If that is a dealbreaker for your firm, we would rather you knew now.
- A SaaS multi-tenant version for fiduciaries with hundreds of clients. Today's deployment is one tenant per firm.
- French and German UI surfaces beyond the report-output language. The product UI is English for reviewers, with localised report output. Reviewer-side localisation is roadmap.
If your firm runs this workflow at scale and you'd like a 30-minute call to see the output on a real statement you bring, book a slot. Bring one month's statement from one of your clients and we'll process it on the call. No demo deck, no pitch slide, just the output.