Ask a German controller how bank reconciliation works today and you will hear a familiar sequence. Export MT940 from the online banking portal. Drop it into DATEV or a shared drive. Match lines in a spreadsheet against open invoices. Repeat for every account at month-end. Dutch teams tell the same story with CAMT.053 from Exact Online or their bank, only the file extension changes.
Cortena bank reconciliation is built for that reality. You can import the statement formats European banks already give you, or connect a live feed through Yapily. Either way, each transaction lines up against the payables you already booked, with matched, partial and unmatched as honest states.
MT940: the statement German banks still send
MT940 is the classic SWIFT customer statement. File extensions vary (.sta, .swi, .940), but the job is the same: a machine-readable list of bookings with value dates and remittance text. Many German banks still deliver it as the default export, and DATEV workflows grew up around that file.
Cortena parses MT940 automatically. Value date, booking text and references come in without a column-mapping exercise. That removes the weekly ritual of opening the file in Excel just to see whether a supplier payment cleared.
CAMT.053: ISO 20022 for Exact Online and SEPA banks
CAMT.053 is the ISO 20022 XML account statement now standard across the SEPA area. Exact Online teams and many Dutch banks prefer it because end-to-end and mandate references travel as structured fields instead of free-text leftovers in an MT940 remittance line.
Cortena reads CAMT.053 (.xml) the same way it reads MT940: import once, de-duplicate on a stable identifier built from bank reference, value date and amount, then match against open payables. Re-import an overlapping statement and nothing is counted twice.
Matched, partial and unmatched stay honest. Nothing is forced to reconcile.
Yapily when you want the feed without the download
File import covers every bank that can export a statement. Direct bank feeds are live through our Yapily partnership across more than 2,000 European banks in 19 countries. You authorise read-only access at your own bank on PSD2 rails. Cortena never stores banking credentials, and you can revoke consent at any time.
Choose per account. One Commerzbank mandate can run on Yapily while a secondary account still uploads MT940 until the connection is ready. CSV remains available for any bank that only offers a spreadsheet export: map date, description and amount once, then every future import follows that shape.
- MT940 (.sta, .swi, .940): parsed automatically, including value date and booking text.
- CAMT.053 (.xml): structured ISO 20022 with end-to-end and mandate references.
- CSV: column mapping saved per bank for non-standard exports.
- Yapily open-banking feed: read-only statements from 2,000+ European banks.
- De-duplication on bank reference, value date and amount.
- Scheduled or manual refresh with a logged cash balance.
Matching against booked payables, not a blank sheet
Reconciliation only helps if the other side of the match already exists. Cortena lines each bank transaction up against invoices you have booked, using amount, reference and supplier. Partial payments stay partial. Credits without an invoice stay unmatched until you decide what they are. You make the final call on anything the agents are unsure about.
Matching logic is configurable with Cortena's agents and workflows, so tolerances and rules follow how your team already works. The cash balance refreshes on a schedule you set, and you can pull a manual refresh before a payment run or a month-end check.
DATEV and Exact Online stay the ledger of record
Bank reconciliation in Cortena does not replace DATEV or Exact Online. It clears the gap between the bank and the payables you are preparing to post. Booking-ready entries still hand off through the integrations you already trust, with a GoBD-aligned trail for German teams and the archive of record staying in your accounting system.
If your month-end still starts with three statement downloads and a colour-coded spreadsheet, the bottleneck is not the bank format. It is the missing match against live payables. Book a demo and we will run one of your MT940 or CAMT.053 files against a week of invoices.