Banking
Bank statement review software for small business
Upload bank and card statements. Every line is read, searchable, and checked, with duplicates, returned items and unfamiliar vendors flagged across every account at once. No bank login, and the file is discarded after reading.
Everyone knows they should. Almost nobody does
A few locations and a handful of cards puts five hundred lines on a statement in a month. You can read all of them, search the ones you already suspect, or move it into a spreadsheet.
Most people try the spreadsheet. Download the PDF, paste it in, and the columns collapse into one, amounts arrive as text, dates come in three formats and the minus signs vanish. That is an hour of cleanup before you can ask a single question.
All of it takes an evening, and none of it finds what you were not looking for, which is the only kind of problem that lasts. So the review gets skipped and the errors stay.
Where the money actually goes
Most owners skip statement review because they decide they do not have a theft problem. They are usually right about that, and wrong about the conclusion.
The expensive lines are almost never fraud. A payment that quietly failed. A manager reaching for the wrong card. A vendor billing the same delivery twice. A subscription nobody cancelled. Ordinary mistakes that nobody is looking for.
What gets checked
| Check | Why it is hard to spot by eye |
|---|---|
| Returned items and reversals | One ordinary line, ordinary amount, cancelling a deposit from weeks earlier |
| Duplicate payments | The two charges are often days apart and pages apart |
| Unusual vendors | Looks normal unless you know what this account usually buys |
| Insufficient funds and overdrafts | Reads as plain text among hundreds of plain-text lines |
| Your own rules | Any word, phrase or merchant you want flagged every time it appears |
Every account in one search
Bank and card statements are read together, already parsed, so one search by keyword, amount or vendor covers all of them. No export, no cleanup. If you want to keep an eye on a particular merchant, add it once and every charge from them is flagged from then on.
Reading the accounts together is what catches problems that span them. A cost that should have hit one location and hit another is invisible on either statement alone, because on each one it looks normal.
Smooth Ops flagged more than $6,000 of cost of goods that one location had been paying on behalf of another, because a manager had been reaching for the wrong card. Every individual charge looked completely normal on the statement it landed on. The pattern only appeared once both accounts were read together.
More on that in tracking company card spending, and on the reversal side in return item chargeback.
No bank login, and the file does not stick around
Most tools here want to connect to your bank, which means handing banking credentials to a third party. Smooth Ops does not. You upload the statement your bank already produces, it gets read and checked, and the file is discarded. The last twelve months stay viewable per account.
Check images open from the transaction, so confirming a check number is a click, not a scroll through a PDF.
Banking is $25 a month per location, or $99 for every module. 30 days free, no credit card.
Statement review, answered
Do I have to connect my bank account?+
No. Smooth Ops never asks for your online banking login or credentials. You upload the statement your bank already gives you, it is read and checked, and the file is discarded afterwards. The last twelve months stay viewable per account.
Does it work with my bank?+
Yes. Because it reads the statement rather than connecting to your bank, it does not matter who you bank with or whether they support a data connection. Bank statements and credit card statements both work, and they are read together.
Is this only for restaurants?+
No. Any business with more than one account, more than one card, or a manager who spends on its behalf has the same problem: too many lines for a person to check, so nobody checks them. Restaurants, salons, gyms, clinics, contractors and property managers all sit in the same boat.
How is this different from my accounting software?+
Accounting software, and your bookkeeper, categorise transactions so the books balance. A transaction can be categorised perfectly and still be wrong: a duplicate is booked twice, a failed payment still looks like a payment, a cost on the wrong location still balances. None of those break a reconciliation. This asks whether the line should be there at all.
What does it actually flag?+
Returned items, chargebacks, insufficient funds, overdrafts, stop payments and reversals are built in. Duplicate payments and vendors outside your regular pattern are flagged automatically. You can also add your own rules: any word, phrase or merchant as it appears on the statement, on a single account or across all of them.
Find what a year of statements has been hiding
Upload bank and card statements together and every line gets read, searched, and checked.
30 days free, no credit card