---
license: cc-by-4.0
pretty_name: RecBench
tags:
  - finance
  - reconciliation
  - entity-matching
  - synthetic
size_categories:
  - 100M<n<1B
---

# RecBench — an open benchmark for financial transaction reconciliation

RecBench is a synthetic, fully-reproducible benchmark for the core problem
of financial operations: **matching a company's internal ledger against
processor settlement reports and bank statements**, at the scale large
fintechs operate (up to 100M transactions/year), with exact ground truth
and a standard evaluation.

Built by [End Close](https://endclose.com). Generator code Apache-2.0;
datasets CC BY 4.0.

## Why

No open reconciliation benchmark exists. Vendors publish only marketing
match-rate claims. RecBench provides what the adjacent entity-matching
field has had for a decade (Magellan, Leipzig, WDC): public data, exact
labels, canonical metrics, published generator.

## The task

Three-way reconciliation over three record collections:

- **`ledger/`** (side A) — the company's internal view: charges, refunds,
  disputes, across 6 currencies and 3 processors
- **`settlement_lines/` + `payouts/`** (side B) — processor reports:
  gross/fee/net arithmetic, FX conversion, timezone sales-day batching
- **`bank_statements/`** (side C) — deposits net of everything, degraded
  references, noise lines

A submission must (1) pair ledger transactions with settlement lines,
(2) pair payouts with bank deposits, (3) un-bundle deposits whose
settlement report is missing (subset-sum matching), and (4) flag the
records that *cannot* be matched. Difficulty spans exact matches through
FX/fee arithmetic, date-boundary shifts, partial captures, duplicated
lines, missing references, and provably-ambiguous cases — every case
labeled, so results break down by difficulty type.
See [docs/DIFFICULTY.md](docs/DIFFICULTY.md).

## Tiers

| tier | ledger rows | total rows (all tables) | size (zstd parquet) | generation time* | seed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| small | 1.0M | ~4.3M | 67 MB | ~20 s | 1042 |
| medium | 10.0M | ~43M | 644 MB | ~2 min | 1043 |
| large | 100.1M | ~430M | 6.0 GB | ~19 min | 1044 |

\* single core, Apple Silicon. All tiers simulate one year plus a 14-day
settlement tail; the large tier has ~3.6M payouts (53k of them subset-sum
unbundling cases). Any tier regenerates byte-identically from its seed:

```bash
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate     # Python >= 3.11
pip install -e .
recbench generate --tier small --out data/small        # canonical seed
recbench generate --tier small --seed 99 --out data/x  # fresh private set
```

## Evaluation

```bash
python eval/evaluate.py --dataset data/small --submission my_submission/
```

Headline metric: **auto-match rate at ≥ 99.9% pair precision** (industry
convention — a false match is far costlier than an exception), plus
precision/recall/F1 per difficulty slice, payout-matching and
deposit-unbundling scores, and exception-detection accuracy. Submission
format: [eval/submission_format.md](eval/submission_format.md). Reference
baselines (`eval/baselines/`): a perfect oracle and a naive exact-rules
matcher that motivates the benchmark:

| metric | naive baseline |
|---|---|
| ledger↔settlement F1 | 0.996 |
| auto-match rate @ P≥99.9% | **0.000** — duplicate lines poison its top confidence tier |
| missing-reference recall | 0.644 |
| deposit unbundling (group-exact) | 0.000 |
| exception recall | 0.000 |

The last few percent are the benchmark.

## Contamination-resistant evaluation

Ground truth for canonical tiers is public for reproducibility. To evaluate
systems that may have trained on it, mint a fresh set from a private seed —
same difficulty distributions, entirely different records. Please keep the
`truth_*`/`labels_*` files out of crawlable training corpora.

## Repository layout

```
recbench/          seeded deterministic generator (config in recbench/config/)
eval/              evaluator, submission format, reference baselines
docs/              SCHEMA, DIFFICULTY, EVALUATION, METHODOLOGY, DATASHEET
scripts/           canonical release build + Hugging Face upload
tests/             determinism, accounting-invariant, and evaluator tests
```

## Citing

> RecBench: an open benchmark for financial transaction reconciliation.
> End Close, 2026. https://endclose.com

## Versioning

Dataset version = generator version (currently 0.1.0, pre-release). Results
are comparable only within a version; every dataset's `manifest.json`
records version, seed, config hash, and per-file sha256.