Bank reconciliation a treasurer can hand over.
For non-profits and treasurers.
You took the treasurer role because somebody had to, and the previous treasurer handed you a folder and a spreadsheet you did not build. The board wants to see the accounts each quarter and the independent examiner wants to see them once a year. Whatever you set up needs to survive you handing it on in two years.
What the work looks like
A small charity or club usually has one current account, sometimes a savings or reserve account, and perhaps a card. Statements are 2 to 6 pages a month with a mix of subscriptions, grant income, event takings and a handful of regular payments. The treasurer does the books in the evening once a month, reports to the board quarterly, and prepares the year-end for an independent examiner or auditor. Restricted funds have to be tracked separately from general funds, which means every receipt needs a fund against it.
Where the time goes
- The previous treasurer's spreadsheet has formulas nobody understands and a balance that has not agreed to the bank since 2023.
- The board asks whether the bank balance matches the accounts and you would like the answer to be yes, with something to show for it.
- Grant income and restricted donations have to be reported against their fund, and the bank statement does not know what a fund is.
- The independent examiner asks for the reconciliations and finds a year of statements and no reconciliations.
- Whoever takes over next needs to be able to do this without you, and without being an accountant.
How it runs with stmtai
- Download the month's PDF statements and drop them in, up to 12 files at a time, so the current, reserve and card accounts go through together.
- Read the balance check. Every statement is summed against its printed opening and closing balances, so the board figures start from rows that are known to be complete.
- Fix any flagged row in place. Include last month's statement in the batch and the continuity check confirms the opening balance agrees to it. This is the reconciliation, and it is repeated the same way every month.
- Open each statement and export it to Excel. In the Transactions sheet, relabel the Category cells with the fund or budget line and type each fund into a blank row of the Summary sheet's totals table; the totals are live formulas and give the board report its figures.
- If the charity keeps its books in QuickBooks or Xero, export the .qbo or Xero CSV instead and import it there.
- File the Excel export with the PDF statement each month. At year-end the examiner gets twelve pairs, each with its tie-out, and the next treasurer gets a procedure that takes an evening a month.
Try it on a real statement
5 pages free, no account. You will know in under a minute whether it balances.
Drop your bank statements here
One file or a whole year. PDF, scanned image, CSV, QIF or OFX. Up to 12 files at a time; long PDFs are split for you.
Not ready to upload your own? See a sample result
Which plan fits
Most small charities fit in the Free plan's 10 pages a month: one or two short statements. If there is a busy month, or you are catching up on a year the last treasurer did not reconcile, a single Pages Pack covers it and never expires. Pro is only worth it for a larger organisation with several active accounts.
Export formats you will use
Guides for this work
Questions
I am not an accountant. Is this going to assume I am?
No. The check it runs is the one the examiner would do: do the transactions on the statement add up to the change in the printed balance. You see a yes or a flagged row, you fix the row, and the Summary sheet records that it agreed. The judgment that stays with you is which fund or budget line each receipt belongs to.
How does the next treasurer pick this up?
The procedure is short enough to write on one page: download the statements, convert them, check the balance result, set the categories, file the Excel with the PDF. There are no formulas to inherit. The new treasurer opens a free account of their own, since the Free plan's 10 pages a month is enough for most small charities, and the outgoing treasurer passes on the filed exports; nothing needs to be transferred between accounts.
Can it track restricted funds?
It can hold the fund against each row in the Category column of the Excel export, and the Summary sheet's totals table has blank rows where you type each fund name to total it. Deciding that a particular donation is restricted is your call from the donor's letter or the grant agreement, not something the bank statement shows. Once set, the totals by fund are what the board report and the year-end need.
The last treasurer did not reconcile for eighteen months. Where do I start?
Convert the eighteen statements in two batches of nine and read the continuity check on each batch. That confirms the statements are complete and the balances join up, which is the part that is hard by hand. Then compare the totals to the old spreadsheet month by month; the month where they first diverge is where the problem is.
Is the charity's bank data kept?
Conversions are in your download history for 7 days so you can fetch a second format or re-download, and then they are no longer available from the history. Keep the exports with the charity's own records, which you would do anyway for the examiner.