When we prepare a set of accounts, we will always ask you for bank statements. In fact, when we ask this question, we are requesting bank statements for all accounts – including PayPal, GoCardless, Stripe and credit cards.

Why? Well…for accuracy. Whilst your bank will send transactions directly through to Xero, there are times when transactions can get duplicated, deleted, or just not sent through at all. So we use the bank statements to ensure that the balances in Xero match the balances on the statements. But providing us with the statements, we are able to find out where a discrepancy occurred, and we can then take the necessary action to ensure the account balances.

Bank statements are the starting point for our accounts preparation work – if the bank accounts don’t balance to the statements, we can’t guarantee that any of the information in Xero is correct.

We are now using a tool, Armalytix, which enables us to request your bank statements through Open Banking. That saves you a whole lot of time as you just have to connect your bank to Armalytix, and we get the relevant statements for the period we need (and we get them in both CSV and PDF automatically). You don’t have to spend time download statements one by one, or exporting CSV files.