Background: In many convenience stores, there's a bowl of pennies near the cash register, and if the customer is short a penny, they can draw a penny from the bowl and call it even. This saves the store and the customer time.
I suggest this be adopted in insurance, banking and other financial businesses
as well (whether customer money is directly involved or not). Very often, when trying to reconcile two files or balance an account, it turns out to be off by a tiny amount like $20.00, out of millions of dollars. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars worth of person hours are then spent trying to track down the missing few dollars and analyze whether it's due to rounding or some other event. I say save the time and money, and whenever a discrepancy of a small amount is found, allow the *option* of the accountants/actuaries responsible for reconciliation, to contribute $20.00 *from their own pockets* into a special "Reconciliation Imbalance Fund", to be held in a special trust fund at the company.
Note that, no matter what the direction of the imbalance, be it too low or too high, the *absolute value* must be contributed to the trust fund. This ensures the trust fund will always be (more than) sufficient to pay all unfunded liabilities that are later discovered.
Then a special "imbalance adjustment" (fudge factor) is added to the account ledger and the account is deemed balanced.
Over time, the trust fund will grow. If, at any point, it is determined that a customer or creditor (e.g. a real person) is owed money that is unavailable from the paying account, then and only then can the trust be drawn from.
When dollar amounts get too large, e.g. in the hundreds of dollars, chances are the accountants won't feel like contributing the money, and only then will those thousands of dollars and person-hours be spent trying to resolve the discrepancy.
Thank you.