Turn a bank statement into categorized books
Give your assistant the statement, have it import the rows along with the opening and closing balance so the arithmetic is checked, then have it categorize the transactions in batches. Preview before each write. Expect to review the handful it could not place, and check any movement between your own accounts.
This is the job most people actually want done: a PDF from the bank at one end, books you can run a report against at the other. It takes one sitting for a month of transactions, and most of that sitting is you reading what your assistant proposed rather than doing anything yourself.
Everything below assumes you have connected an assistant already. If you have not, the setup pages take a few minutes and this will wait.
Before you start
- A book to import into. If you have not made one, ask your assistant to create a business or personal book first — it seeds a chart of accounts.
- The statement itself, as a PDF, a CSV, or text you can paste.
- The statement's opening and closing balance. These are on the statement and they are what makes the import checkable.
1. Import the whole statement in one call
Your assistant extracts the rows and calls the import tool with them, along with the two balances you gave it. The engine adds the opening balance to the sum of the rows and checks the result against the closing balance.
That check is the reason to supply the balances rather than skipping them. An extraction that missed three rows in the middle of a page looks completely normal in a list of transactions and is caught immediately by arithmetic.
Import the whole statement in one call. Splitting one statement across several calls makes repeated identical charges look like duplicates, and they get skipped.
What you should get back: A row count, how many were inserted, how many were skipped as duplicates, and the computed closing balance beside the one you supplied. If those two disagree, stop and find out why before categorizing anything.
Tools: Import a bank statement without a manual data-entry pass
2. Look at what came in before categorizing it
Worth thirty seconds. You are checking that the dates cover the period you expect, that the signs make sense — money out negative, money in positive — and that nothing obviously belongs to a different account.
For a credit card, purchases are negative and payments to the card are positive, so the balance is a negative number. That trips people up more often than anything else here.
What you should get back: A list with dates, descriptions and amounts, none of them categorized yet.
Tools: Find the transactions still waiting to be categorized
3. Categorize in batches, previewing each one
Your assistant decides what each transaction is and proposes an account for it. This is the part that is genuinely model work — recognising that a hardware store on a business book is probably job materials rather than office supplies requires knowing what the business does.
Because the confirm flag defaults to false, the natural call is a preview: you see the exact journal lines, with amounts, before anything is written. Read them. Approving a batch you did not look at is the same as not having a preview.
Transactions it cannot place come back as skipped with a reason rather than failing the whole batch. That is what you will be dealing with in the next step.
**Watch the transfers.** If money moved between two of your own accounts and both sides appear in your books, categorizing both sides records the movement twice. Every balance check still passes, because both entries are individually valid double-entry. Categorize one side, and treat the other as the same event.
What you should get back: A preview listing each transaction with the account it would post to and the journal lines it would create. Then, once confirmed, a count of what was posted and what was skipped.
Tools: Turn bank transactions into real, balanced bookkeeping
4. Deal with what it could not place
There will be some. Cash withdrawals, a payment to a person, a charge from a company whose name says nothing about what it sells. These are the transactions where you know something the model cannot.
This is where the time goes, and it is time you would have spent anyway doing this by hand — except you are answering four questions instead of making four hundred decisions.
What you should get back: A short list with a reason for each, and a suggestion you can accept or correct.
Tools: Find the transactions still waiting to be categorized, Turn bank transactions into real, balanced bookkeeping
5. Set up rules for the ones that repeat
Anything you will see again next month is worth a rule. It saves the decision rather than the typing, which is the part that actually costs you.
What you should get back: Confirmation that the rule was created, and what it will match.
When it does not go to plan
| What you see | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The computed closing balance does not match the statement. | Rows were missed in extraction, usually across a page break, or the statement was split across several import calls. | Re-import the whole statement in one call. Re-importing the same statement is safe and inserts nothing that is already there. |
| Everything on a credit card statement has the wrong sign. | Amounts are from the account holder's point of view. On a card, purchases are negative and payments to the card are positive. | Tell your assistant explicitly that this is a credit card statement before it imports. |
| Your spending looks roughly double what you know it was. | Both sides of a transfer between your own accounts were categorized as separate expenses. | Reverse one side. Reconciling against the real statement balance is what surfaces this, and is worth doing before you trust a report. |
| A batch failed and you cannot tell which row caused it. | Usually an amount that could not be parsed. | It should come back in the skipped list with a reason rather than failing the batch. If a whole batch failed, ask your assistant to show the exact arguments it sent. |
Common questions
- How long does a month of transactions take?
- For a hundred or so transactions, roughly fifteen minutes, most of it reading previews. The second month is faster because the rules you made in the first one do the repetitive work.
- Can I import several months at once?
- Import one statement per call, but there is nothing stopping you doing twelve calls in one session. Keep each statement whole.
- What if I disagree with a category after posting?
- Reverse the entry. The reversal releases the transaction so it can be categorized again, and both the original and the correction stay on the record.
- Do I need to know accounting to do this?
- Not to run it. It helps to know what a chart of accounts is, so that when your assistant proposes an account you can tell whether it is plausible.
Checked against the tools on 2026-08-09.