What Even Is a Bank Reconciliation Anymore?

Post 1 of 5 — What our team is doing internally to serve you better

We’re kicking off a short series on how AI is changing our work and what that means for you. I want to start this short series with the most honest thing I can say to you about what AI is doing to our profession. It’s a real specific function we perform as accountants: read on to see what I mean.

A bank reconciliation has been one of the core functions of an accountant for decades. At its most basic, it is the process of comparing the transactions recorded in your accounting system to those that cleared the bank or credit card account during a certain period (usually monthly), then confirming that the ending balance in the books agrees with the statement balance on the bank or credit card. Generations of accountants have done this work.

But here in 2026, the accounting and banking tools with embedded AI already know whether your account is reconciled. You can just ask the software. “Is this account reconciled?” And it will tell you.

The work itself is changing

It is tempting to read that and think the answer is “AI is taking accounting work away.” That is not actually what is happening. What is happening is more interesting and, in my view, more important.

The reconciliation question used to be the work. Now the reconciliation question is just an answer the software hands us. The work is what comes next: noticing the unreconciled item that should have cleared two weeks ago and asking why. Spotting the duplicate vendor payment hiding in a clean reconciliation. Recognizing that a perfectly reconciled account does not mean the underlying business is healthy.

In other words, the mechanical part of accounting is becoming a setting that the software maintains. The judgment part, the noticing, the questioning, the connecting of one number to another, is still the job and the one we’re good at. In fact, that has always been the job. We have just spent decades of our profession dressed up as people who do reconciliations.

What we are doing about it inside the firm

Internally, my team is going through a quiet, deliberate exercise: looking at every recurring task we do for our clients and asking which parts the software now handles, which parts still require a human being, and which parts are vestigial. We still do this work because we have always done it, even though it stopped being valuable six months ago.

That sounds simple. It is not. Every task on that list is something somebody on my team is good at, has always done, and may have built their professional identity around. Letting go of those tasks is harder than learning new ones. We are doing it anyway, slowly, because the alternative is letting our work drift toward becoming the kind of thing the software can do for free.

What this means for you

When you get a monthly package from us now, the assembly of it has been handled with AI assistance and, in some cases, by the embedded AI inside the financial software you and we already use. The thinking that accompanies it, the questions we are asking on your behalf, the things we are flagging, the conversations we are starting, that is where the team’s time is going.

It is the same fee. It is genuinely different work. Over the next four posts in this series, I want to show you what that work looks like inside our firm: the AI tools we built (one of them has a name, you will meet him in the next post), the way we have trained the team to talk to those tools, why I am not lowering our prices, and what we will not let AI touch.

For now, the headline is just this: the job has not gotten smaller. It has gotten different. Our work right now is making sure your fee buys you the new job, not the old one.

If you want to talk about what any of this means for your engagement with us, email us at [email protected] and we will set up a time to talk.