Built N8N Workflow That Reconciles Bank Statements In 30 Seconds 🔥

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Friend's small business. Bank statements arrive monthly as PDF files. Someone spends 3-4 hours typing every single transaction into Excel spreadsheet. Categorizing manually line by line. Looking for weird stuff that seems wrong.

Last month missed a $6,200 duplicate charge from vendor. Caught it 3 weeks later during random review.

THE N8N WORKFLOW

Built 7-node automation watching Google Drive folder.

Google Drive Trigger watches folder → Download Statement when uploaded → Extract Transactions with structured data → Analyze & Categorize using rules → Log to Sheets summary → Check for anomalies → Alert Team if issues found

EXTRACTION POWER

Pulls everything from PDF automatically:

Account number and statement period

Opening balance and closing balance

Every transaction: date, description, debit, credit, running balance

Total debits and total credits

Complete transaction array

THE CATEGORIZATION

Automated rules categorize transactions:

Payroll: salary, payroll, wages

Utilities: electric, gas, water, internet

Food: restaurant, grocery, food

Transportation: uber, gas station, parking

Uncategorized: needs manual review

Each transaction gets category assigned. Builds spending breakdown automatically.

THE ANOMALY FLAGS

System catches problems immediately:

Large transactions over $5,000

Negative balances any day

Unusual patterns detected

All flagged with details

Slack alert sent if any flags found. Team notified immediately.

THE RESULTS

Processing real bank statements now. 200-300 transactions typical per month.

Before automation:

3-4 hours manual data entry work
Inconsistent categorization by person
Anomalies found late or missed
No systematic review process

After automation:

30 seconds total processing time
100% consistent categories applied
Immediate anomaly alerts sent
Complete Sheets historical tracking

Real example from last month statement:

247 total transactions processed automatically
30 seconds total processing time
3 large transactions flagged for review
1 negative balance caught immediately
8 items uncategorized needing manual review
Time saved: 3 hours 50 minutes that month

Google Sheets maintains complete history. Every statement logged with account, period, opening/closing balances, net change, transaction count, flags found.

Friend's response: "I actually enjoy reviewing statements now. Just look at the flagged items instead of everything."

Import to n8n. Connect Google Drive folder. Connect Google Sheets for tracking. Connect Slack for alerts. Customize categorization rules. Test with statement. Deploy.

Setup: 20 minutes. Runs automatically forever.

What manual data entry is eating your accounting time?

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