A company bank feed sorted into a chart of accounts

The situation

A bank export is a list of merchant strings and amounts. Turning that into something you can read as a business, what went on people, on software, on acquisition, and which side of the company earned what, is the part nobody wants to do monthly in a spreadsheet.

What we built

• The full statement pulled across every currency balance, in 120 day chunks, deduplicated on reference and balance
• Twenty categories under five groups, matched on 154 merchant substrings in priority order, falling back to the bank's own merchant category before ever giving up
• One correction writes a rule and rewrites every matching row, past and future, and a manually set row is never overwritten by a later sync
• Recurring spend detected from the history rather than declared: three or more distinct months to count, three consecutive months and a charge inside 31 days to still be live