Before You Hand Over Your Books
Seven checks to run on a year of books before they go to your accountant, with AI or without.
Want help applying this to your books? Get in touch and tell me what you're working with.
The year that arrived as a pile of statements
In August a client came to me with a year of bank statements and no books. Their accountant needed a profit and loss, a balance sheet and a general ledger by a deadline, and the statements were all there was to work from. In my experience that's a pretty normal place for a small business to be, and the records can be rebuilt.
The job covered 4 bank accounts, 5 credit cards and a vehicle loan across two banks, 2,246 transactions in all. I'm not a bookkeeper, and I said so up front. AI did the reading and the sorting, and most of my time went into checking it, because nearly every problem on that job produced a confident wrong answer instead of an error message. Nine days later the accountant had all three reports, 15 days before the deadline, with the balance sheet tied to the penny.
These are the seven checks I'd run again on any job like it. They work whether you keep your own books, have AI help or hand a box of statements to someone else.
I don't prepare tax returns. These checks get the books ready, and the decisions that belong to your accountant stay with your accountant.
The checklist
Copy it into a document and fill it in for one year of books. Do the checks in order, since each one builds on the one before it.
Business: [name]
Year of books: ____________
Deadline: ____________
1. Is every account on the list?
Bank accounts: ____________
Credit cards: ____________
Loans: ____________
Opened or closed this year: ____________
2. Do I have every month's statement for every account?
Months missing: ____________
Scans or photos only: ____________
3. Did my method rebuild a year that was already filed?
Year tested: ____________
Figures that matched: ____ of ____
4. Does every account match the bank's daily balances?
Checked day by day: ____________
Days that didn't match: ____________
5. Did a bank, card or bookkeeping app change partway through the year?
What changed, and when: ____________
Payees with two spellings: ____________
6. Is money held for customers kept out of income?
Money that isn't mine yet: ____________
Transfers back to customers: ____________
7. What does my accountant need to decide?
1. ____________
2. ____________
3. ____________
The facts behind each one: ____________
Ready to hand over when: every account matches its statements, every daily balance matches and the decisions page is written.
Why each check is there
Each check has a plain way to do it. The right-hand column is what it looked like on the nine-day job.
| Check | How to do it | On the nine-day job |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Is every account on the list? | List every bank account, credit card and loan before you sort a single transaction, including any opened or closed during the year. A missing account never shows up as an error. Its spending just isn't there. | 4 bank accounts, 5 credit cards and a vehicle loan, across two banks. |
| 2. Do I have every month's statement? | Get every month for every account, including any that only exist as scans or photos. Have those typed up, by hand or by AI, then run check 4 on them, because that's where typing mistakes hide. | Three months existed only as photos. The AI read 171 transactions off them. |
| 3. Did my method rebuild a year already filed? | Before you trust a method on a new year, run it on last year's statements and compare the result with last year's filed books. Run it again every time you change a rule. | 107 of 107 figures matched before the new year was touched, and the test ran again after every change. |
| 4. Does every account match the daily balances? | Most statements I've seen print a running balance for every day with activity. Replay the transactions in date order and check you land on the bank's number every day. A monthly total can't catch two mistakes that cancel out, or a right amount on the wrong day. | 55 of 55 daily checkpoints matched on the photographed months, about 18 checks a month instead of one. |
| 5. Did a bank, card or app change mid-year? | After a switch, every regular payment has two spellings, one per bank. Write each sorting rule for both spellings, then look for any payee that got sorted two different ways. | 6 of the 8 sorting bugs came from one bank switch. A check built to hunt for that pattern found the sixth on its first run. |
| 6. Is money held for customers kept out of income? | List deposits, retainers and anything else you're holding for someone else, plus every transfer back. Keep all of it out of income, and ask your accountant how they want it shown. | The biggest single correction of the job: my own sorting rules had counted 44 transfers back into the account that holds customers' money as income. |
| 7. What does my accountant need to decide? | Write a short summary of every decision that belongs to the accountant, with the facts behind each one, and send it with the reports. | Two pages, seven decisions. Three spreadsheets on their own would just have moved the work onto the accountant's desk. |
If AI is helping
AI is good at the reading and the sorting. In my experience it's less good at saying when it doesn't know, so I ask for the rows behind every answer.
When a total is off and the AI explains why, ask it to show you the rows. On the nine-day job one difference got explained as "year-boundary timing." It turned out to be refunds counted as payments.
This prompt runs check 4 on one account for one month. Paste in the opening balance, the transactions and the daily balances from the statement.
Below are the transactions for one account for [month and year], the opening balance and the daily balances printed on the bank statement. Start from the opening balance. Replay the transactions in date order, using code to do the arithmetic. After each day, compare your running balance with the bank's balance for that day. List every day that doesn't match, with both balances and that day's transactions. Don't explain any difference and don't round anything. Just show me the rows. Opening balance: [from the statement] Transactions: [paste here] Daily balances from the statement: [paste here]
The last line does the most work. Without it, the AI tends to offer a reason that sounds right. With it, you get a short list of days to look at, and in my experience a clean month comes back with an empty list.
One more habit from that job: before anything went to the accountant, an AI from a different company reviewed the work three times. It found real problems every time, including a check of mine that could never fail.
About Andrew Voskov
Andrew Voskov is the founder of Cherry Pi AI. He spent twenty years running online businesses before AI, including two Amazon brands, and bookkeeping jobs like this one are part of his work now. This checklist came out of rebuilding a client's year of books from bank statements in August 2026. The full story is in the year-end books case study, and there's more about bookkeeping for small businesses.
If you've got a year of statements and a deadline, get in touch. Tell me how many accounts and how many months.
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