As of 13 August 2026, AI can reconcile your business bank transactions.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your online business bank account and export the relevant transactions as a CSV, including the transaction date, amount, payee, reference and bank transaction ID where available.
   2. Export the same period from your bookkeeping or accounting system, including the ledger date, amount, payee, reference, invoice or transaction ID and account code.
   3. Remove unrelated accounts and periods from both files, then record the opening balance, closing balance and currency shown on the bank statement.
   4. Paste the prompt into a chatbot and upload both files, stating the business name, period and whether the bank amounts are shown as positive and negative values or as separate money-in and money-out columns.
   5. Check the model's bank total and closing balance against the original bank statement, and check its ledger total against the accounting system before accepting any match.
   6. Open every unmatched, duplicate and discrepancy row in the bank and bookkeeping systems, attach the relevant invoice or receipt, and resolve only items supported by that evidence.
   7. Send the reconciliation table, exception report and supporting evidence to your bookkeeper or accountant if the period feeds VAT, statutory accounts, payroll or a tax return.

   Prompt

   Reconcile the attached business bank transaction export against the attached accounting ledger for [business name] and [period]. Treat the bank export as the source for what actually cleared. Match transactions using date, amount, reference, payee and any existing transaction or invoice ID, allowing for normal date differences only when the evidence supports it. Do not invent transactions, dates, amounts, VAT treatment, nominal codes or explanations. Preserve the bank transaction ID and ledger ID for every match. Produce: 1) a reconciliation table with bank transaction ID, ledger ID, date, amount, payee, match status and evidence used; 2) unmatched bank transactions; 3) ledger entries with no bank match; 4) possible duplicates; 5) amount and date discrepancies; 6) a short list of items requiring a human decision. Calculate the bank total, ledger total, matched total and difference, and show the arithmetic. Do not silently write off differences or decide whether an item is allowable for tax or VAT. State which columns are missing or unreliable. Give me a CSV-ready table and a plain-English exception report. Before presenting the result, check that each bank transaction appears once at most and that the reconciliation difference agrees with the displayed totals.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.