The Biggest Goal Podcast
The Biggest Goal Podcast, with Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson.
Learn how to reach your biggest goal as we reimagine the workflows you run into scalable systems that use today's latest technology.
Every week, we take one real workflow and cover what you're likely doing now and how to improve it with today's latest technology. We'll look at where AI could be applied, what should be automated, and where you still need a person.
Alane and Micah are the co-founders of Biggest Goal. They grew an agency to 600+ active clients before their exit and have since helped 300+ teams put technology to work building scalable systems across every department.
(Formerly this podcast was called: Automate Your Agency)
The Biggest Goal Podcast
AI bank reconciliation in 10 minutes | EP 113
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Bank reconciliation is the task everyone wants to automate, and before today's AI tech, nobody could. Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson explain why it stayed manual for so long, then walk through the exact prompt that turns eight to ten hours of line-item matching into a short 10 min review.
When you export your statements from your bank and QuickBooks (or another accounting platform), there are no matching IDs, no shared descriptions, and nothing a traditional automation could key off; somebody had to sit down and compare them line by line, and that somebody was expensive.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why rules-based automation could never reconcile your books and what changed when AI could read AWS, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon Web SVCS as one vendor
- The three-rule starting prompt that matches on description, amount, and a three-day date window
- How to read the exceptions when AI explains that a check has not cleared or a bank fee has not hit QuickBooks yet
- How to turn the first run into a reusable skill so you never re-explain your setup again
- Where the human stays in the loop, because the matching is low-value work and the exceptions are not
- How the same approach applies to investment property statements, media buys, and anything else with two lists that should agree
Reconciliation might be a boring task, but that's exactly why it is a great place to point AI first. Press play and start automating your reconciliation workflow this week.
This episode is brought to you by Biggest Goal, the company Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson co-founded.
Fifteen years of scaling their own companies taught them that adoption is a people problem long before it's a technology problem, so we train executives and their teams through workshops, cohorts, mastermind groups, and hands-on support.
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Welcome back, everybody. You are listening to the Biggest Goal podcast. Formally automate your agency. So if you're wondering if you are in the right place, you are. And we are so excited. I am your co-host, Alane Boyd.
Micah JohnsonAnd Micah Johnson.
Alane BoydAnd today we are going to be talking about one of the most recurring pieces of a business, and that is bank reconciliation. We're going to talk about why this is such a prime one to be using automation. We're going to talk about how to do it and give you a quick little tip on how to get this done almost immediately after listening to the episode.
Micah JohnsonI know I want to articulate how much time can be saved, but I kind of want to just say it up front here, Alane, that we can take these three hours and turn this into a 10, 15 minute job max. But before we get into all of that, let's talk about some of our live upcoming events. So we've been hard at work, even with all the podcast rebranding, putting together a ton of programs for people to learn about how to use cowork, how to use AI, how to deep dive into all kinds of stuff. So we've got a free cowork webinar coming up. We've got a deep dive on when should you use Claude Code versus Claude Cowork. We've got my favorite, my latest favorite, I guess I should say, is our three-hour co-work foundations workshop. And that is bringing you from if you've never touched cowork before or just dabbled in it and know you're kind of just using it as glorified chat, three hours later, you're going to be building dashboards, you're going to be building slide decks, you're going to be using cloud design, you're going to be a master at building skills. You'll have everything you need to start getting kicked off with cowork. And then finally, we've got a deep dive on today's topic, which is how do you actually build an account reconciliation or a bank reconciliation workflow with AI? Now, all of our events are located on our website at biggestgoal.ai. Simply just go to biggestgoal.ai, and in the upper right hand corner, you'll see a link for upcoming sessions. Okay, so reconciliation until recently has been a completely manual task, tedious task. Like it's awful.
Alane BoydI think some people put it off even for months.
Micah JohnsonI I would oh, and my first business? Now, this is years and years ago. My first business, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I hated it.
Alane BoydJust wait till the end of the year when your taxes are due.
Micah JohnsonOh, that was the biggest surprise ever. Yeah. So, all right. Well, this podcast is not about skipping reconciliation. It's like if you're a responsible leader and you actually do your reconciliation and you're not a 19-year-old kid, then here's what to do. We've got a situation where we have a completely manual task. It's repetitive. We got to do it every month or more often. And there's a set of rules associated with it. But the rules are really kind of simple.
Alane BoydAnd it's not like you have brand new rules every single month.
Micah JohnsonYeah. That's what I like too.
Alane BoydYou know, you might have some new things, new charges, and stuff like that that you have to match up. But for the most part, it is the same every month.
Micah JohnsonI like it when there's not new charges, but there's new revenue. I'll take it on that side of the equation. All right. So we so with this workflow, the reason that we couldn't manually do, or the reason that we couldn't automate this before was because if we get a bank statement and if we get our QuickBooks and we export those two and we start looking at them, not even the names match up. There's no matching IDs. There's no way to like programmatically or deterministically through like traditional automation, go through line item by line item and try to figure out what matches, which meant somebody had to do that manually.
Alane BoydYou know what I keep imagining when we're talking about this too, Micah, is okay, think about whenever you were a kid, a long, long, long time ago.
Micah JohnsonEasy now.
Alane BoydYou know how but when you're a kid, like teaching you how to look for things that are similar. And so you have a column of things on the left and a couple of things on the right, and they're all in dis disordered. So you have to draw a line from what matches to on one side to the other side. That's what I keep thinking about.
Micah JohnsonThat's literally what we're doing here with reconciliation.
Alane BoydAnd you know, when you get a little bit like you know, five years old, maybe they kind of change like what goes together. And so you might have a broccoli florette with a full head of broccoli, and you go, oh, these things go together. Well, in traditional automation, that's a more difficult thing to tell it.
Micah JohnsonBecause we're dealing with logic, and so it has to be like an if this or that. So, in order to do all of this, I I love that visual. In order to do that, which is why we couldn't, is because you would have to have a logic path for every single use case. AWS or Amazon Web Services or Amazon Web SVCS, period. Every single variation of every single line item would have to be created in the automation, which would defeat the purpose of creating the automation because you'd always just be editing the automation when you have more or different charges or checks coming in or whatever it might be.
Alane BoydYeah, that's why using AI makes it easier.
Micah JohnsonWell, that is the answer. That is what changed, right? Is like, and that's that's what we're why we're doing this episode today is because that is something we and we get this question all the time. Oh, where do I start? What can I apply AI for? How do I do it? And we always say start small and start with the mundane, start with the boring stuff. Well, here we go.
Alane BoydYeah, this is something that's behind the scenes that takes hours and isn't sexy. Yeah. And I, you know, and I run into this all the time when I'm talking to people and they're like, Well, I don't want to lose the human touch on things. Great, don't never would I want you to do that. This is something in the background that has to get done. That is such a I hate saying like low value, but for a human, it's low value. It has to be done.
Micah JohnsonSo the matching work is low value now.
Alane BoydRight.
Micah JohnsonThe looking at what didn't match and solving that high value.
Alane BoydYes, exactly. That's where you want your people spending that time on those decisions, being an expert, asking the questions, not on data that matches.
Micah JohnsonYeah, yeah. So AI, this, I love this. This is a perfect case for AI because this is what AI excels at. Give it a bunch of data, make it look and analyze, and make it make connections. So it can look at AWS, it can look at Amazon Web Services, and it can look at Amazon Web SVCS abbreviated, period, and it'll go, you know what? These are all the same. And it can look at Salesforce and then Salesforce.com and go, you know what? Those are the same. Yeah. And then it can look at the amounts and it can go, the amounts match. Cool. The dates. The dates are within three days of each other. Great. We now have a scenario where this is a valid matching line item. But not only can it do all of that, it can do all of that in seconds.
Alane BoydOkay, y'all. I have a big favor to ask. We have thousands of listeners every single month. But if you look at our reviews on Apple and Spotify and all those sites, we have less than 10 reviews. We need our listeners to go and give that feedback. We would be so appreciative if you just took a second, put us on pause, go leave us a review and come right back. Thank y'all. And you know, Mike, I know we clearly see how this works in our head because this is we build this kind of stuff. And even the technology when we're talking about AI has evolved. If we would have been talking about this in January of 2026, we would have been talking about it from an AI agent standpoint, building it in something like N8N. But now with cowork, or even you could do it in Chat GPT work too. We just always lean towards Claude Cowork in our in our examples. But now, like if you're listening, you're like, well, that sounds really cool. How do I use AI? We're not even talking about chat.
Micah JohnsonLike we oh yeah, this is good good clarification. Like, this is not chat.
Alane BoydThis is not chat. And yes, you could do it with an AI agent, N8N or something like that.
Micah JohnsonBut it would take you longer to build.
Alane BoydYes. Thank you. So with co-work, you can do this so easily.
Micah JohnsonSo let's let's actually tell everybody who's listening how to build a reconciliation workflow in co-work right now. We can do it verbally. Do you want to tell them or should I?
Alane BoydGo ahead.
Micah JohnsonAll right. Here's what you do: you get your two files that you want to reconciliate or more files. I know Alane, you've done this multiple times where it's multiple files and you'll have Claude Cowork, reconcile multiple things all at the same time, and it still kicks ass, knocks it out of the park. But what you do is you grab your files that you want to reconcile, you give those to Claude Cowork, and you say, Here's what I want you to do. I want you to please reconcile these files. I want you to look at the descriptions and find the ones that are similar, that have matching amounts, that have dates that are within three days. Those are that's a great rule set to start. And give me a set of findings from your reconciliation and tell me what has matched and what hasn't and why you think it hasn't matched. And what it'll do is actually produce an entire output document for you of all the matching line items so that you can quickly scan down and review. And then anything that doesn't match, it'll give you what didn't match and why it doesn't match or why it thinks it doesn't match. And the reasoning is so important here because it could look at it and it could go, oh, well, this is the end of the month. It was a check. The check hasn't cleared in the bank yet. That's why it's not on the bank statement. Or it's a bank fee. That's why it's not in QuickBooks yet. And so all of those things that it can have enough context from, it can reason around that. And then you're just like, yep, yep, yep, cool, cool, got it. All right, awesome. If but you don't want to eliminate people out of this. I think that's the hardest part.
Alane BoydSo let's let's talk about a couple of things here, Micah. One, so you and I have both done this separately, and I've even done it in, you know, I own investment properties, and I get a statement from um the management company with Oh, I love this.
Micah JohnsonI know where you're going with this.
Alane BoydWith the breakdown of, you know, if they had to do some work at the building, um, things like um and the rents that come in. And then we also have um other investment properties where it's a different structure, but I still need to account for all of this money coming in and out and want to make sure everything's correct. And so if you're listening, where I'm going with this is take what we're talking about with the bank rents reconciliation piece, because it can be applied to a lot of other things. Like maybe my investment property example is almost identical to it, but just another way to replicate it, even though I don't have this massive company with investment properties in my small little world, I've made this work with the same idea.
Micah JohnsonTotally.
Alane BoydThe other way that I've also seen this exact same thing play out is for companies that do media buys. Yes. You're not doing a bank reconciliation with, you know, your your credit. Well, actually, you are doing it with your credit card statement because you have to put a credit card on file.
Micah JohnsonBut there's other variables here.
Alane BoydYeah, like your team is executing on that, not your bookkeeper necessarily. They're taking a piece of that. But when you're listening to, this can be applied to so many things in your life or business, big or small.
Micah JohnsonYes. Now let's so let's just kind of dissect those a little bit. Let's take your investment property. When you're going through those reports and you're doing reconciliation, you're figuring out all that. I'm hoping you're not gonna say, I leave everything up to AI and make no judgment calls myself.
Alane BoydNo. Um yes, and Micah, I do actually. Okay, no. Perfect. No, I don't. And so what I have it do is I and like you said, I just put everything in there. So credit card charges, bank statements, all in there. And what I have it do is build me a spreadsheet. And I even think the first time I did it, it asked me, you know, what would you like the output to be? And I said a spreadsheet, and then that's all I had to say.
Micah JohnsonSo, real quick, because this I think is such an important point for us to make. You're not coming from a development background, you're not coming from a systems background, like per se, right? Like that's I mean, Micah. All right, but that's not like you didn't go to school to be a design systems engineer and did that for 20 years, right? Like, so you're not over-engineering, you're just like, hey, Claude, here's my stuff. Do this and get me a spreadsheet. Cool. And then what happens?
Alane BoydThe the most beautiful spreadsheet you've ever seen. Like, it would take me hours to design that. And I mean, I think back for taxes earlier this year when I when I did this with co-work, that normally would have taken me so long. And I do that I do put off until it's time to do it.
Micah JohnsonYou don't like doing taxes? Oh, weird.
Alane BoydNo, no, no, no. The spreadsheet. I don't like doing the spreadsheet. So I did wait until the last you know minute to do it. But uh, it would have taken me so long. And it did before I had cowork doing that work for me, it would be hours and probably eight to ten hours to assemble all of the stuff, go through everything, double check everything, and it categorizes everything, and then it puts notes on why it did what it did, things that, and then it makes a section at the bottom, like, hey, these things I couldn't find. You need to talk to so-and-so or your CPA about these things. I am not saying we don't need those experts, but it got me a whole lot farther than me having to do all that manual.
Micah JohnsonAll right, so you were at eight to 10 hours. How long did it take you once you? So let me let me pose this because we've got this other this other element here is you can do this the first time with Claude. You don't want to have to repeat this with Claude every single time and tell him the whole story and go through all this rigma roll. At the end of the first time doing this, just ask Claude, hey, make me a skill so that I can repeat this over and over. Claude will make you the skill, and then next time run the skill with the files and your spreadsheet, your outputs, your preferences, your structure. Everything stays the same. So you were at eight to 10 hours, you now have a skill. How long does it take you now?
Alane BoydIt takes me about 30 minutes.
Micah Johnson30 minutes from eight to 10 hours.
Alane BoydSo I'm gonna also, I'm scared to even say this part because the other thing that I have that is making the process even faster for next time is I get an email statement from my management company every month. Yeah, I have Claude Code pull that out on a routine, save it into Dropbox and rename the file because they send the file and it's always the same name and it renames it with that month and year in the folder that it's supposed to save those statements.
Micah JohnsonSo this is definitely more advanced, right?
Alane BoydSo very advanced.
Micah JohnsonNo, no, I know, I know. But this isn't something. So I think to try to qualify and clarify, what I'm saying is you didn't do that first round. No, you didn't go, I'm gonna solve this big problem and I'm gonna do all of these things, and then I'm gonna check the email and go to Claude Code and then do this and co-work and then make this skill and do this spreadsheet and do this and then draft the emails and then automate this. You stopped at the very beginning, you started small and stopped and just got to like, here's the files, do this, make me a spreadsheet. That's it.
Alane BoydThat was my very first thing. The other thing that we haven't mentioned either, and sometimes you can do this beforehand if you know the rules that you want to go ahead and tell it. The other time it's like sometimes you don't know what's already in your head until you see it. Until you see it. Yes. So what I've learned now doing this in different ways, investment property one being one of them, is that oh, I do know some of these things ahead of time. And so I'll work with cowork on refining the rule set to save. And then that gets saved into the skill, like, oh, well, we already know this and this matches. Okay, this number should be matching this number next time and whatever it might be. And it makes it go so much smoother. Then it's even less time I have to spend.
Micah JohnsonYeah, because it's catching the additional things that you don't have to worry about. And the whole part of where does the human fit in this is I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around when people say I automated reconciliation. That makes it feel like it's a hundred percent automated.
Alane BoydYeah, I I don't know that there's anything that we advocate being 100% automatically.
Micah JohnsonIt's tough. It's very tough. I mean, there are some things, but it it can't be touching money, it can't be making judgment calls, it can't be doing these big things. So let's eliminate the heavy lifting of line item reconciliation, put it in a format that makes it really easy for a person to understand that is a subject matter expert or a domain expert of finance and knows what's going on, and then have that person spend their five, 10 to 30 minutes, but saving seven, eight, nine hours, even nine and a half hours in this scenario that we're painting here. Nine and a half hours a month.
Alane BoydA month, yeah. That's insane. It's crazy. And what I love too about the spreadsheet, so you know, our we have a bookkeeper at this company, we're not doing our own bookkeeping.
Micah JohnsonAnd yeah, because you already know I just skip it.
Alane BoydCan't count on you. But and then I'll just wait until the end of the year, too. No, but we have a bookkeeper. Well, uh, she can do this process. And for the questions, just comment in the spreadsheet, like, hey, I need you to like I have these questions here for it. And that's what I love about that output. And it for us goes into a Google Sheet. That's where we have those files saved. So commenting and tagging us is really easy if they need to ask us questions.
Micah JohnsonYeah. So give Claude the files, don't let AI make judgment calls, don't over-engineer, start small and start simple, get some outputs, get that working, get that time saved from that heavy lifting, and then iterate, then improve. Because you're gonna see, like you were saying, Alane, you're gonna see once you do it once or twice, you're gonna go, whoa man, wouldn't it be nice if it would? And then you fill in the blank, and then you go to Claude and you'd be like, Hey, what about this? And when you want to get to the advanced stuff, right? That's where companies like biggest goal come in because that's what we help our clients with. Hey, what's the best way to have it watch my email and check this and write email drafts and you know, and get to the bigger solution one small step at a time. But that's where we come in. This basic reconciliation, if you're listening to this, please just go and try it. I guarantee you can get far with this.
Alane BoydAnd we actually built a product, a course on our community. So if you go to your.biggasgoal.ai and go to the left hand side, there is a bank reconciliation course that you can get access to. It's only $49. It's three lessons, takes less than an hour to go through. And with Claude's help, it teaches you how to create this bank reconciliation process that we went through.
