Stop 5 of 8 · Weekly
The reconciliation difference
Bank statement on one side, register export on the other, Claude lists the candidates that could explain the gap, and Farid picks.
The half hour that used to be two
CL-07's August reconciliation is off by 412.60. Farid knows the shape of this: scroll the register, scroll the statement, find the transposition or the duplicate or the fee nobody booked. Some months it takes ten minutes. Some months it takes an evening and he finds it at 11pm.
The comparison itself is what Claude is genuinely good at. Two lists, same period, find what is on one and not the other, find what appears twice, find pairs that add to the difference, find a pair of digits swapped. That search is mechanical and Farid gets tired doing it. Claude does not.
Give it both sides
The statement as a PDF, with the account number cut from the header. The register export from QuickBooks Online for the same dates, as a CSV. Nothing else, or Claude starts reconciling against the payout report as well and reports differences that are not differences.
Tell it the size and the direction of the gap as well. A search that knows it is looking for 412.60 in favour of the register behaves differently from one told to find anything odd, and the second one comes back with fourteen observations and no answer.
The five shapes a difference takes
| Shape | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Duplicate entry | Same amount, same week, both sides of the register |
| Timing | Cleared after the statement date, or a payout across month end |
| Missing row | Bank fee, interest, a returned payment never booked |
| Transposition | Two digits swapped, so the gap divides evenly by nine |
| Wrong sign | A refund entered as a deposit |
Here is CL-07's August bank statement and the QuickBooks Online register export for the same dates. The register is higher than the statement by 412.60. List every candidate that could account for some or all of that difference: duplicated entries, items in one file and not the other, amounts that sum to the difference, and any pair of amounts that look like a transposition. For each candidate give me the date, the amount, which file it is in, and what would have to be true for it to be the cause. Rank by how much of the difference it would explain. Do not tell me which one is correct and do not draft a correcting entry. [upload the redacted statement and the register export]
From the same two files, list every subset of up to three uncleared items whose amounts total exactly 412.60. Amounts and dates only, no interpretation.
None of the candidates hold up. Widen the window to the two weeks either side of the statement period and repeat the comparison. Then list what a difference of this size and sign usually turns out to be, as a checklist of things for me to look at in the register myself.
Once a candidate holds up in both files, the correction is a normal QuickBooks Online entry and Farid writes it himself. It takes a minute. The evening he used to lose was never the entry, it was the looking.