Improved assistance is provided to an operator during jam recovery of an image-based financial document processing system used to process transaction items including debit and credit items. Information associated with a first group of transaction items is displayed after a jam condition has occurred to enable the operator to retrieve at least some of the transaction items of the first group of transaction items. Information associated with a second group of transaction items is displayed as the operator feeds transaction items from the second group of transaction items back into the system to reprocess these transaction items. The displayed information associated with the first group of transaction items and the displayed information associated with the second group of transaction items are compared to determine if a transaction item from the first group and a transaction item from the second group match. When a match is found, a determination is made as to which operations of the system, if any, have yet to be completed for the particular matched transaction item. Operations which have yet to be completed for the particular matched transaction item are selectively performed. When a match is unable to be found, an operator is able to either force a match between a transaction item from the first group of transaction items and a transaction item from the second group of transaction items, or remove a transaction item from one of the first and second groups of transaction items.