Bank-to-AR Payment Reconciliation

The problem this kills

Every month the bank says one thing and your AR ledger says another. Someone exports a bank statement, exports a list of recorded payments, and starts the slow, error-prone hunt: lining up deposits against payments in a spreadsheet, eyeballing amounts, chasing the ones that don't tie out. Bank fees throw off the totals. A deposit that posts on Friday but was recorded on Monday looks like a mismatch when it isn't. A payment gets keyed twice. And the part that really hurts: a genuine discrepancy hides inside all that noise and nobody catches it until the auditors do.

The spreadsheet has no memory, no audit trail, and no approval step. You can't prove who reconciled what, or that anyone actually reviewed the exceptions before close. This tool fixes all of that.

What you'll build

A small, private web app — just for your team — that does the reconciliation the way you wish the spreadsheet could:

• Import a bank-deposit file and a recorded-payments file (CSV upload or Google Sheet).
• Match deposits to payments automatically, using rules tuned to how your data is actually shaped.
• Flag everything that doesn't tie out: unmatched deposits, unmatched payments, and amount variances — with bank fees and timing differences handled sensibly instead of treated as errors.
• Route for sign-off: an accountant reviews the matches and the proposed resolution of every exception, then approves. Nothing is "closed" until a human says so.
• Produce a clean reconciliation report and a CSV in the exact columns your accounting system expects.

It runs in a weekend, and it's yours — no per-seat SaaS fee, no consultant.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

A complete, paste-and-go runbook written for a non-coder. You paste the whole thing into Claude Code and it builds the tool with you, step by step.

The plan opens by interviewing you about your business — your current reconciliation process, the bank and accounting systems you use, the exact column names and reference/transaction-ID conventions in your files, your typical and peak deposit volumes, your tolerance rules for fees and rounding, and your messy edge cases (partial payments, lumped deposits, reversals). It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up. You get a tool shaped around your reconciliation, not a generic template.

From there it walks through: setting up the database and login, building the importers with duplicate guards, the matching engine and variance logic, the exception worklist, the accountant approval gate, the report + CSV export, and a verification checklist so you know it works.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a throwaway script — it's built to survive an audit:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own reconciliations.
• A complete audit trail — who imported, who matched, who approved, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts the reconciliation and proposes how to resolve each exception, but an accountant must review and approve before anything is marked closed or exported to your system of record.
• Duplicate guards keyed on deposit date + amount + reference, so the same deposit or payment can't be processed twice.

Who it's for

AR specialists, staff accountants, and controllers who own the month-end bank-to-AR reconciliation and are tired of doing it in a fragile spreadsheet with no proof of review. If you can fill out a form and follow numbered steps, you can build this.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.