Reconciliation Checker — confirm your statement actually balances

What this tool does

Every bank statement is a closed-loop system. Three numbers must agree:

opening balance + (sum of transactions) = closing balance

If they do, the statement data you're holding is internally consistent. If they don't, something is wrong — a row was misread, a decimal point moved, a debit got recorded as a credit, or a transaction was duplicated or missed. This tool runs that single check for you and shows the exact delta.

It accepts amounts in pretty much any format a bank uses: 1,234.56 (US/UK), 1.234,56 (EU), (123.45) for negatives (US-style), and trailing CR/DR markers. Date columns are ignored — only the last numeric token on each line matters.

Why reconciliation matters more than "accuracy"

Every bank statement converter on the market claims some accuracy number — 95%, 98%, "AI powered". Those are marketing claims. Reconciliation is the math-based safety net that tells you the data is actually right. It doesn't matter how clever an extraction tool is: if it doesn't reconcile, you don't have trustworthy data.

The dangerous failure mode isn't a tool that fails noisily — it's a tool that succeeds quietly with wrong numbers. The CSV loads cleanly into QuickBooks, the rows look plausible, and one row was extracted as £25.91 instead of £52.91 because OCR swapped two digits. That number is now in your general ledger. Taxes get filed on it. By the time you catch it, it's costing real money to undo. We wrote a longer piece on what auto-reconciliation actually means — worth reading if you've ever felt unsure about a "successful" import.

How to use it

1. Type the opening balance exactly as it appears on the statement.
2. Type the closing balance from the same statement.
3. Paste your transactions — one per line. Debits as negative (-100), parentheses ((100)), or with a DR suffix. Credits as positive or with a CR suffix. We pick up the last number on each line, so a copy-paste from a statement PDF usually works without cleanup.
4. The verdict updates live. Green = reconciles. Amber = doesn't reconcile, with the exact difference shown.

Common reasons a statement doesn't reconcile

1. Missing transactions. Page breaks in PDFs are a classic culprit — extractors sometimes lose a row at the seam. Count your rows.
2. Duplicate transactions. Multi-line transaction descriptions get parsed as separate rows by naive extractors. Look for adjacent identical amounts.
3. Sign inversion on a single row. A debit got read as a credit. The delta is exactly 2× the amount. If you're off by, say, £50.00, scan for a £25.00 transaction whose sign should flip.
4. Locale parsing. An EU statement read as if it were US: 1.234,56 parsed as 1.234. Off-by-three-orders-of-magnitude is the giveaway.
5. OCR digit swaps. 7s and 1s. 6s and 0s. The classic scanned-statement failure mode. Our paid bank statement converter uses Gemini's vision model with a reconciliation pass that catches these explicitly.
6. Bank's own error. Rare, but happens. Pending interest, a missed charge-back, a fee accrued the day the statement closed. Banks aren't infallible.

Beyond this tool

This checker is intentionally minimal: paste numbers, get verdict. If you're converting actual statements into accounting software, our main bank statement converter runs reconciliation automatically on every conversion — and when it doesn't reconcile, walks the running balance row by row to highlight the exact line that broke the chain. Free for 7 pages a day. For batch use, paid plans start at €19/month.

If you've ever been burned by a "successful" import that silently corrupted your books, this is the workflow we built to fix it.