Reconciliation workbench

Questions people actually ask

Why does it matter that files are not uploaded?

Because a client’s bank statement is exactly the data an accountant or bookkeeper must not hand to third parties — engagement letters, firm policy and professional bodies all say so, and every converter, SaaS reconciler and AI chatbot requires precisely that upload. This tool parses and matches entirely inside your browser: there is no upload, no account, and deliberately no sync. You can watch the network tab while you work and see nothing leave.

How does the matching work?

In tiers, strictest first: exact matches (same amount, same date), then near-date matches (same amount within your date tolerance — bank clearing delays), then combined matches, where one bank line equals the sum of several book entries — the batched deposit case that breaks VLOOKUP. Ties are broken by description similarity. Every match is labelled with its tier, so you always know how confident to be.

What is the "fully explained" badge?

The reconciliation identity — the property that makes a reconciliation a reconciliation. The difference between your books total and the bank total must exactly equal: items missing from the bank, minus items missing from the books, plus the amount mismatches. This tool computes both sides independently and shows the badge only when they agree to the cent. If they ever disagree, the tool is wrong and says so — it never quietly absorbs a discrepancy.

What does "÷9 — transposed digits?" mean?

An old auditor’s trick: when two digits are swapped in an amount (99.99 entered as 99.00, 540 as 450), the resulting error is always divisible by 9. When an amount mismatch has a difference divisible by 9, the tool flags it, because the most likely explanation is a typo in one system rather than two different transactions.

What file formats work?

CSV exports — from QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, FreeAgent, any online banking portal, or a spreadsheet saved as CSV. Columns are detected from the data itself (dates look like dates regardless of what the header claims), split debit/credit columns are recognised and combined, day-first and month-first dates are auto-disambiguated, and accounting formats like (500.00) and trailing DR/CR parse correctly. Every detected column can be overridden by hand.

Can it reconcile PDF bank statements?

Not yet — CSV first, because it is lossless. Most online banking portals export CSV alongside PDF; use that. If your bank genuinely only provides PDFs, the text can usually be extracted via our PDF Studio and saved as CSV, and native text-layer PDF support here is on the roadmap.