Bank statements → QuickBooks

Before → after

Before: PDF bank statements arrive by email. Someone opens each PDF, reads transactions, and creates or matches entries in QuickBooks manually.

After: Statements land in a shared intake folder or inbox rule. OCR extracts payee, date, and amount. Rules suggest categories. A bookkeeper approves a batch in one sitting.

Steps to implement

1. Standardize intake — Create a dedicated email alias (statements@yourfirm.com) or Dropbox folder per client.
2. Choose an extraction layer — QuickBooks bank feeds where available; for PDF-only banks, use a document parser (Dext, Hubdoc, or similar) that exports to QuickBooks.
3. Map accounts once — Build a client-level chart mapping (common payees → GL accounts).
4. Set review cadence — Weekly 30-minute batch review beats month-end panic.
5. Log exceptions — Flag ambiguous lines for client clarification instead of guessing.

Failure modes

• Multi-page PDFs with poor scan quality — OCR confidence drops; route to manual queue.
• Commingled accounts — Split personal/business before automation; do not auto-post mixed feeds.
• Duplicate imports — Dedupe on date + amount + payee hash.

When not to automate

First month with a new client, messy historical books, or trust accounts with strict compliance — stay manual until the chart and rules are stable.