A system and method for automated recovery of processing of a unit of work during an error in a batch processing system is disclosed. Generally, at least a portion of a unit of work and instructions of operations to perform to process the portion of the unit of work is sent to a worker data structure. A periodic heartbeat is received from the worker data structure indicating the worker data structure is processing the at least a portion of the unit of work. If an unexpected termination of the worker data structure is detected, a signal is sent to a crash handler data structure instructing the crash handler data structure to detect and store a current input location of the at a portion of the unit of work. The records from the current location at the crash are skipped during reprocessing of the unit of work to increase the chances of success during reprocessing.