Every serious reconciliation platform begins its onboarding with the same question: which ERP? The answer determines the connector, the connector determines the data model, and the data model determines everything the product can do. It is a sensible architecture — for the customer who has one ERP.
Who has one ERP
Large groups that grew organically or integrated their acquisitions. Their entities sit in one instance or a few tightly integrated ones; intercompany transactions are tagged at source; a close platform can pull every entity's sub-ledger nightly. For them the market offers excellent products, and the real contract values reflect it: Vendr's 2026 data puts the median BlackLine contract around $40,000 a year and FloQast around $24,000, with implementations on top.
Who does not
- Outsourced accounting firms. Each client has its own system. Some give the firm a login, some send exports, some send a spreadsheet the owner's nephew maintains. Connecting a platform to each is not an option the client will pay for.
- Mid-market groups built by acquisition. Three ERPs, two legacy systems, a joint venture on a fourth. A unified-ERP project is on the roadmap for 2028.
- Groups with client or partner entities. The counterparty is not under your control at all.
For all of these, the intercompany reconciliation runs on what the entities can actually produce: a trial balance export, the invoices behind it, the bank statement, and an email thread. The data is there. It is just not in a database.
The document is the integration
This is the premise TieOut Pilot is built on. Instead of asking which ERP, it asks for the files. A ledger export in any layout is mapped once per entity. Invoices are read as documents, including scans. Emails are read as the record of decisions they actually are. Matching is done on the normalised result; explanations are drawn from the documents themselves, with the page cited.
It is slower than a connector in one way — someone has to upload the files — and faster in every other: no implementation project, no IT ticket, no waiting for the client's system to expose an API, and no month where the connector broke and nobody noticed.
What you give up
Close-management platforms do more than intercompany: task checklists, certifications, journal workflows, flux analysis, SOX controls. If you need those and you have one ERP, buy one of them. TieOut Pilot does one thing — intercompany reconciliation and the audit evidence behind it — for the groups and firms the platforms were not designed for. The compare page says so in a table.