Business bank statement analysis without a spreadsheet weekend

Most small businesses review their finances twice: once in a hurry each month, and once properly at year end when it is too late to change anything. The monthly version usually happens in a spreadsheet built from a bank download, which is quick and quietly misleading, because a bank statement on its own does not know which credits are income, which debits are costs, and which are the same money moving around.

The five documents that make a month make sense

1. Bank statements for every account, covering the full period with no gaps.
2. Card statements, personal cards used for business included, since that spend is real.
3. Processor payout reports, which explain the deposits the bank cannot.
4. Invoices and bills, which turn payments into explanations.
5. The accounting export, so what you believe happened can be checked against what did.

Missing any one of these does not stop the analysis, it just moves an error somewhere you will not see it.

The three adjustments that fix most bad numbers

Exclude own account transfers. Money moved to a tax reserve and back is not turnover. This single adjustment changes reported income more than anything else on the list.

Split gross from fees. A processor deposit is a batch of sales minus a fee. Record the sales and the fee, not the deposit. See gross, fee and net.

Separate tax from the money it sits inside. Sales tax collected was never yours, and treating it as revenue makes a business look better than it is right up to the point the return is due.

What to actually look at

• Money in, money out and net movement for the period, then the same figures month by month.
• Top payers, because customer concentration is a risk you can only see when it is ranked.
• Top payees, which is usually where an unnoticed subscription or a duplicated supplier payment lives.
• Fees as a percentage of income, which should be stable and is worth investigating when it is not.
• The three biggest surprises, rather than a line by line review nobody finishes.

Reading the statement itself

Business narrations are dense and several line types are not what they look like. The details are in how to read a business bank statement, and the abbreviations in bank statement abbreviations and codes.

Doing it in Karchu

Upload the documents, in whatever formats you have them: PDF, CSV, TSV, spreadsheets, ODS, or photographs of receipts. Karchu recognises the document type and the exporting system, extracts counterparty, fee, tax, invoice and reference fields where the file provides them, flags transfers, and produces money in, money out and net movement with a CSV export. The full list of supported types is on the business document analyzer page, and processor specifics are on the processor analyzer page.

What analysis will not do

It will not decide what is deductible, will not file anything, and will not tell you whether a cost was worthwhile. It tells you, accurately, what happened to the money, which is the part most businesses are missing when they make those decisions.

Frequently asked questions

What documents should a monthly business review include?

Bank statements for every account, card statements, processor payout reports, invoices raised and bills received, payroll, and the accounting export for the same period. Anything missing shows up as an unexplained difference.

Why does my turnover look higher than it is?

Almost always because transfers between your own accounts are being counted as income, or because gross sales and the payouts of those same sales are both being counted.

Do I still need an accountant?

Yes. Analysis tells you what happened to the money. An accountant decides how it should be treated, what is deductible and what has to be filed.

Is business document handling included in every plan?

No. It is part of the Business plan. Starter and Pro keep the personal statement handling they already have.