bank-recon

What This Skill Does

The bank-recon skill is a specialized automation tool designed to streamline the financial reconciliation process between bank statements and internal general ledgers. By automating the comparison of bank statement data—whether provided in structured Excel format or raw PDF files—this skill reduces the manual labor traditionally required by accountants and bookkeepers. It employs a sophisticated layered matching logic that identifies records based on shared transaction keys, batch IDs, and semantic descriptions. Furthermore, it performs intelligent amount comparisons using absolute values to account for differing debit/credit polarities, ensuring that totals are accurately aligned even when source signage differs.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/chipmunkrpa/bank-recon-skill

Use Cases

• Automating month-end close processes for businesses with high volumes of bank transactions.
• Streamlining the review of PDF-based bank statements by converting them into machine-readable Excel data.
• Identifying discrepancies between internal accounting records and real-world cash activity.
• Generating audit-ready reconciliation workbooks that categorize items into matched, unreconciled bank, and unreconciled GL transactions for easy review.

Example Prompts

1. "Please reconcile my January bank statement (statement.pdf) against the general ledger (gl_export.xlsx). Let me know the count of matched and unreconciled items."
2. "I need to run a reconciliation between my bank activity and the GL. Use a threshold of 0.50 for the variance check and output the results to recon_january.xlsx."
3. "My bank statement is in bank_activity.xlsx and the GL is in ledger.xlsx. Can you generate the reconciliation report with summary, unmatched bank, and unmatched GL tabs?"

Tips & Limitations

• The skill assumes that the input workbooks follow a standard structure with three primary columns: Date, Amount, and Description/Memo.
• For PDF files, ensure they are digital-native (text-selectable). Scanned image PDFs without OCR may fail to extract correctly.
• Always review the 'Unreconciled' tabs generated in the final workbook, as these represent transactions that failed automated validation and require human verification.
• If the reconciliation results seem incomplete, verify that the transaction keys or vendor IDs are consistent across both the GL and the bank statement files before running the process again.