🏦 Banking
Nobody reads their bank statements line by line. Smooth Ops does
Upload bank and card statements and every line is parsed, searchable, and checked. Duplicate payments, returned items and vendors you rarely use get flagged on their own, across every account and every card at once.
- ✓Search every line by name, amount, or vendor across all accounts at once
- ✓Duplicate payments, returned items and unusual vendors flagged automatically
- ✓Check images open from the transaction, instead of hunting through a PDF
Works on its own
The review nobody actually does
Every owner knows they should read their statements. Almost nobody does, and it is not laziness. A few locations and a handful of cards puts five hundred lines on a statement in a month. The honest options were reading all of them, using find for the ones you already suspected, or copying it into a spreadsheet, where the columns collapse, amounts arrive as text and the minus signs vanish before you can sort anything. All of it takes an evening, and none of it finds the thing you were not looking for.
Where the money actually goes
Most owners assume statement review is about catching theft, decide they do not have a theft problem, and skip it. The expensive things are almost never fraud. They are a payment that quietly failed, a manager reaching for the wrong card, a vendor billing the same delivery twice, a subscription that renewed after it was cancelled. Ordinary mistakes, made by people doing their jobs, that no one is looking for and no one will find.
Smooth Ops found a $780 payment that had been deposited and then reversed three weeks later, because the check behind it was never honored. The money went back out of the account as a single ordinary looking line. Nobody caught it, the amount was still owed by the vendor, and it had been sitting there for almost a year.
Every account at once, in one search
Bank and card statements are read together, so a search by name, amount or vendor covers everything at the same time. That matters most when the problem spans accounts, like a cost that should have hit one location and hit another instead. On separate statements those two lines never meet. In one searchable place, they sit next to each other.
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.
The flags you want, plus the ones you write
Returned items, chargebacks, insufficient funds, overdrafts, stop payments and reversals are watched for out of the box, because those are the lines that cost real money and read like ordinary text. Duplicate payments and vendors you rarely use are flagged too. On top of that you can add your own: any word, phrase or merchant as it appears on the statement, on one account or all of them, flagged every time it shows up.
Read, checked, and discarded
Smooth Ops never asks for your online banking login. You upload a statement, it is read and checked, and the file itself is discarded. The last twelve months stay viewable per account so you can look back, and nothing beyond that is kept. Check images open straight from the transaction, so verifying a specific check number takes a click instead of a scroll through a PDF.
Banking, answered
Do I have to connect my bank account?+
No, and that is deliberate. Smooth Ops never asks for your banking login or credentials. You upload the statement your bank already gives you, it gets read and checked, and the file is discarded afterwards. The last twelve months stay viewable per account.
Does this work with any 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 useful for restaurants?+
No. This is the most general thing Smooth Ops does. Any business with more than one account, more than one card, or a manager who spends on the company's 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.
What actually gets flagged?+
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.
How far back can I look?+
Twelve months per account. The statement files themselves are discarded after they are read, so what you are looking back through is the checked and searchable version, not a stored copy of your bank's PDF.
How is this different from what my bookkeeper does?+
A bookkeeper categorises transactions so the books balance. A transaction can be categorised perfectly and still be wrong: a duplicate is booked twice, a payment that failed still looks like a payment, a cost charged to the wrong location still balances. This checks whether the line should be there at all, which is a different question from where it belongs.
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