Bank reconciliation in Ireland: with a feed or a statement upload

Your VAT return, profit figure and cash position all rest on the bank being right. A payment recorded twice, a receipt never recorded, or a transfer coded as income will flow straight into those figures. Reconciling regularly catches each of these while you still remember what happened.

A live feed brings transactions in automatically each day through open banking, read-only and without your login details. A statement upload does the same job on your schedule: download the statement from online banking as a file, upload it, and the software lines up each transaction against the books.

For most small businesses, a weekly upload is enough. The matching work is the same either way.

Each bank line is matched to something already in the books, such as an invoice, a bill or an expected payment, or it is coded as a new transaction. Good software proposes the match by amount, date and payee, and learns your regular suppliers. Where one bank line pays several invoices, it should let you split the payment across them rather than forcing a single match. Your job is to confirm the proposal or correct it.

When the books and the bank do not agree, the cause is usually one of these.

• A transaction entered by hand and then imported again from the bank.
• Bank charges and interest that were never recorded.
• A customer paying several invoices in one transfer, matched to only one.
• A card payment recorded on the day of purchase but cleared days later.
• A transfer between your own accounts recorded as income or expense.

Credit cards, Revolut accounts and payment platforms such as card terminals and online checkouts need reconciling too. Platforms pay out in batches net of fees, so reconcile each payout to the platform’s statement and record the fees separately. Treating a net payout as sales understates both turnover and costs.

Reconcile weekly, close the month once every account agrees to its statement, and never file a VAT return from an unreconciled ledger. If an unexplained difference appears, look at the week it first appeared rather than the whole month; differences are much easier to find close to their source.

At the end of June, the bank statement shows €12,480 and the books show €12,705. Working through the unmatched lines, you find a €30 quarterly bank charge that was never recorded and a €195 customer receipt entered by hand and then imported again from the statement.

Recording the charge and deleting the duplicate brings the books to €12,480, matching the statement. Ten minutes of checking has corrected the profit figure, the debtor balance and the cash position at once, which is why reconciliation comes first in every close.

Notice that neither error would have shown up on the VAT return or the profit and loss on its own. Only the comparison with the bank exposed them.

HelloBooks reconciles with AI, proposing a match or a category for each bank line and learning from your corrections; nothing posts until you confirm. In Ireland, direct connections to banks including AIB, Bank of Ireland, Permanent TSB, An Post Money, Revolut and N26 are rolling out through our open-banking partner, and statement upload with line-by-line AI reconciliation works with every bank now.