In industrial process plants, using the fact that the mass entering and leaving any portion of a process plant must balance, data validation and reconciliation algorithms may be employed to correct measured flows, provided that enough redundancy of flow measurements exist to permit statistical reconciliation and exclusion of detectably erroneous measurements. Since all real world measured values contain inherent error, the reconciled measurements provide a better basis than the measured values do for financial reporting, optimization, and regulatory reporting. Software packages exist to make this commercially feasible on a daily basis.