We asked forty finance teams to time a single supplier-statement reconciliation end to end — retrieval, matching, queries, posting. Then we loaded the cost.

$11.40 per match

The median came to $11.40. Not because anyone is slow, but because the task fragments attention: four systems, two tabs of context, one interruption. At two thousand matches a month, that is a full-time salary spent on work no one chose.

The number to manage is not headcount. It is the unit cost of routine judgment — and it is now a choice.