Why do you ask for our bank statements at our year end?

After your company financial year end we will ask for your bank statements as part of our Year End Accounts preparation procedure. We will usually ask for them in both PDF and CSV format. The reason we need your bank statements is to check that the balances in Xero match the bank balances. It is a common misconception that because the bank feeds information directly into Xero that it must be correct. However there are occasions when the bank feed stops working or something is amended accidentally. We use the bank statements to confirm the bank balance is correct at the end of the year, and to go back and identify where things have gone wrong if it doesn’t match. If we identifies large chunks of missing data, we will use the CSV to import the data into Xero rather than manually adding individual lines in.