Monthly Reconciliation Workflow

Before You Start

Gradient works best when you reconcile at the end of the billing cycle and invoice at the start of the next one. By default, any approved changes take effect on the first day of the following month, which aligns naturally with a bill-in-advance workflow.

You'll want roughly 30 to 60 minutes for a typical reconciliation, depending on how many customers and integrations you have. Block the time, close email, and work through the dashboard in one pass. Reconciling in scattered ten-minute sessions across the month tends to leave things half-done.

If this is your first time: Don't try to reconcile your entire book in one go. Start with one or two of your largest customers to get a feel for the flow, then expand from there. The process gets much faster once you recognize the pattern

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Step 1: Check Your Unmapped Counts

The very first thing to do each month is open Data Sources > Advanced Config and check your unmapped count. Do this for both the Accounts tab and the Services tab.

If anything is sitting in Unmapped, Gradient won't show service cards for it. That means you could be missing revenue or counts for those customers and products without knowing it. Resolve unmapped items before going any further.

Unmapped accounts: A customer was added to a vendor portal but hasn't been mapped to your PSA. Map it or exclude it.
Unmapped services: A new product appeared in a vendor catalogue. Map it or exclude it.

Why do this first? Everything downstream depends on mapping. If you run syncs and open the dashboard before clearing unmapped items, you'll be working with incomplete data without realising it.

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Step 2: Run Your Syncs

You need fresh data from both your PSA and your vendors before reviewing anything. The order matters:

Full PSA sync first. Go to Settings > Data Settings > PSA Configuration > Start Full Sync. This pulls the current state of your PSA (all customers, agreements, services, quantities) into Gradient. Wait for it to complete before moving on.
Vendor syncs second. From Sync Status in the left-hand navigation, you can run Quick Sync All to pull the latest data from your vendor integrations. This is typically faster than a full vendor sync and is enough for most monthly reconciliations.

QuickSync vs Full Sync: QuickSync pulls only what's changed since the last sync and is the default for regular monthly reconciliation. A full sync pulls everything from scratch and is only needed when you've made major changes (e.g., renamed many customers in your PSA, or reset an integration). If you're unsure, QuickSync is almost always the right choice. See the separate article on QuickSync vs Full Sync for more.

About the sync status screen: The sync status shows when Gradient last ran the sync, not when the vendor last provided new data. Some vendors (notably distributors like Pax8) only update arrears billing data on certain dates of the month. If the data looks stale, it may be that the vendor hasn't published it yet, not that Gradient hasn't synced.

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Step 3: Review the Dashboard

Head to Contract Reconciliation in the left-hand navigation. This is where you'll spend most of your time during reconciliation.

You'll see service cards across the dashboard representing each service on each customer agreement. Each card is in one of three states:

Reconcile: The PSA quantity and vendor quantity don't match. You need to make a decision.
New Revenue: Vendor usage exists but there's no matching PSA service on the customer's agreement. An opportunity to add billing.
No Change: PSA and vendor quantities match. Nothing to do.

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Step 4: Group By and Filter

Before you start approving cards, organize the dashboard so you can work through it efficiently. A few strategies work well:

By Vendor

Open Filters and select one vendor at a time. This lets you reconcile a single vendor end-to-end before moving to the next. Useful if you tend to invoice by vendor or if you want to catch all the Microsoft cards together.

By Account

Switch to List View and use Group By > Account. Good for going customer-by-customer, especially for your largest clients where you want to eyeball everything together.

By Type

Use the Type filter to show only increases and decreases, only new revenue, or only no-change cards. Helpful when you want to handle all the easy no-change cards in a bulk action, then focus on the exceptions.

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Step 5: Approve, Dismiss, or Review

Every card needs to be actioned one of three ways:

Action	What it does	When to use
	Pushes the vendor quantity to your PSA, updating the agreement.	The vendor count is correct and you want your PSA to reflect it.
	Takes no action; the card disappears until the next billing cycle.	You've reviewed and decided not to change the PSA quantity this month.
	Opens the Details view where you can manually adjust quantities, set effective dates, or link new revenue to a PSA contract.	For new revenue cards, or when you need to customise what gets pushed (e.g., prorated quantity or specific date).

Bulk approval

For customers or vendors with many no-change or straightforward reconcile cards, you can bulk select and approve. Hover over a card and click the pink checkmark in the top right corner (card view), or use the checkboxes on the left (list view).

Always spot-check before bulk approving. Bulk approve is a big time-saver, but it will happily push bad data if your vendor integration is misconfigured. Check a handful of cards before bulk approving, and pay special attention to any large quantity changes. The first time you bulk approve, Gradient will show a warning. Read it.

Setting an effective date

By default, approved changes take effect on the first day of the following month. If you need a different date (for example, to prorate mid-month adds or credits), click the dropdown arrow next to the Approve button and choose Set Effective Date.

Proration is only available when your PSA supports it and the agreement has proration enabled. See How to Prorate Transactions in Reconcile Billing Module.

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Step 6: Cost Reconciliation (Optional)

If your vendor costs change frequently (Microsoft price updates, for example), the Cost Reconciliation tab is worth including in your monthly flow. You'll find it next to Contract Reconciliation in the left-hand navigation.

Cost Reconciliation shows vendor cost vs PSA catalogue cost side by side, and lets you push cost changes to your PSA catalogue with one click. It's particularly valuable at the start of a new quarter or after a major Microsoft price update.

For permissions requirements (some PSAs need additional API permissions for cost writes), see Cost Reconciliation.

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Step 7: Final Sanity Check

Before you generate invoices, do a quick sweep:

Filter the dashboard by Increases only and confirm nothing looks out of place.
Filter by New Revenue and confirm you've either added or dismissed each card.
Check the Activity Log to confirm the changes you made are what you intended. You can find this in the left-hand navigation under the Reconcile section.

If anything looks wrong, you can go back into the agreement in your PSA and adjust directly. Gradient's changes are real quantity pushes, not queued drafts, so edits after approval happen in the PSA itself.

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Common Pitfalls

Reconciling before syncs complete

If you open the dashboard while a sync is still running, you'll see stale data. Wait for both PSA and vendor syncs to finish before reviewing.

Bulk approving without checking

A handful of bad vendor records can create a cluster of wildly wrong service cards. Bulk approval pushes them all without review. Spot-check large changes before bulk approving.

Missing Detect New Revenue opportunities

New Revenue cards are the single most valuable thing Gradient surfaces. Don't dismiss them without reviewing. A dismissed new revenue card is almost always money you're walking away from.

Forgetting about multi-site customers

Customers with multiple sites or subsidiaries often don't map cleanly one-to-one. Tag these accounts so whoever runs reconciliation next month remembers they need manual handling.

Leaving unmapped items for 'later'

Later is how unmapped lists grow. Clear them at the start of every reconciliation. It takes five minutes and saves you compounding work down the line.

Still stuck? Reach out at support@meetgradient.com and we'll get you sorted. 🦩

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