Analysis for people who reconcile other people's books.

The work is not the addition. It is deciding what each line was, and being able to show the decision afterwards.

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How do I find what a year of bank transactions actually says?

Classify every line before summarising anything, and keep transfers between the client's own accounts out of income. A credit matched to an equal debit from another account they own is not revenue, and refunds netted against the spending they reverse are not income either. Those two rules alone routinely move a year's stated income by more than ten per cent.

Transfers are the largest single correction

Money moved from a savings account to a current account produces a credit that looks exactly like revenue in the receiving account. A year of that inflates income by whatever was moved, and the total still reconciles perfectly against the bank.

Catching it needs both sides present, which is the argument for loading every account rather than the trading one. A credit matched to an equal and opposite debit within a few days is a transfer, and the pairing should be listed so a human can disagree with it.

In one worked example those rules are the difference between $486,200 of income and $548,600 of nonsense.

Merchants before categories

A statement says SQ *THE COFFEE HOUSE 04, not a category. The descriptor changes when the merchant changes payment processor, so categorising the raw string produces three merchants where there is one and three category totals that are each wrong.

Normalise the merchant first, then categorise. It is more work and it is the step that makes every downstream number defensible.

Report what did not match

Receipts matched to invoices on reference and amount will leave a residue, and part-payments need grouping back to the invoice they belong to. The residue is not a failure; it is the list somebody has to work through.

What matters is that it is counted and named rather than quietly absorbed. An unmatched receipt that disappears into a category total is a reconciliation that reports success and is not one.

What to ask the client for

Every account, not just the trading one, because own-account transfers can only be identified when both sides are present. A CSV or OFX export beats a PDF statement: a PDF has already discarded the payment reference field, which is what invoice matching runs on.

Then the sales ledger or invoice list. Without it you can classify spending and cannot reconcile receipts, which is the half of the work that produces the awkward questions.

See it on a real project

Two clients, 38% of revenue, accounted for every one of the 38 overdrawn days.

Is winter actually our slow season?

Try it on your own file.

Every check described here runs automatically, and your first findings arrive in full before you pay for any of it.

No account needed to start. You only pay when you like what you see.