Match a month of bank transactions to invoices and flag the gaps
Idea + starter prompt, not run by us yet
For: Small business owners who lose an afternoon every month matching receipts
The author dropped one month of bank statement data plus a handful of invoices into a single folder and gave Cowork one prompt. It cleaned vendor names, sorted expenses into categories, matched invoices to transactions, flagged the ones with no invoice, made a formatted Excel file and renamed invoices in one style. It got everything right in her small test and she says it saves a full afternoon each month.
Steps
- Copy one month's statement and its invoices into a new folder.
- Start with a small, non-sensitive test before using real full months.
- Ask Cowork to match and flag, and to show a plan before renaming files.
- Check the flagged rows and a sample of the matches yourself.
- Keep the originals untouched so you can redo it if something goes wrong.
Starter prompt
In the folder [folder name] there is my bank statement for [month] and some invoices. Work on copies only. Clean up the vendor names, put each transaction in a category from this list: [categories], and match each invoice to its transaction. Flag every transaction with no invoice. Build an Excel file with all of this. Before renaming any invoice file, show me the new names and wait for my OK.
Original post: Substack · found via agentusecases.ai. Written up in our own words. We haven't run it, so test it on made-up data first.