Categorize messy bank and card transactions to my chart of accounts
Sorts a raw transaction export into the right accounts, with confidence levels and a short list of items that need a human answer.
The prompt
Help me categorize bank and credit card transactions for bookkeeping.
Business type and what it sells: [e.g. "two-location dental practice", "Shopify apparel store"]
Chart of accounts (expense and income accounts I use): [PASTE list]
Transactions to categorize: [PASTE export - date, description, amount]
Rules I already follow: [e.g. "software subscriptions under $500 go to Software", "owner's personal Amazon orders go to Owner Draws"]
Accounting basis: [cash / accrual]
For each transaction:
- Suggest the account, a cleaned-up payee name, and a confidence level (high / medium / low).
- Flag likely transfers between the business's own accounts, loan payments (split principal vs. interest as [NEED LOAN SCHEDULE]), owner draws or contributions, refunds, and sales tax collected - these are the usual miscategorizations.
- Flag possible personal expenses, duplicates, and anything over [AMOUNT] that might need to be capitalized.
- Do not guess on vague descriptions (e.g. "POS 4471", "Zelle J. Smith"). Mark them [ASK CLIENT].
Return:
1. A table: Date | Description | Cleaned payee | Suggested account | Confidence | Note.
2. A short list of questions for the business owner, grouped so they can answer in one pass.
3. Suggested bank rules I could set up in my accounting software for recurring payees.
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Finance & Accounting prompts
What to fill in
- e.g. "two-location dental practice", "Shopify apparel store"
- PASTE list
- PASTE export - date, description, amount
- cash / accrual
- NEED LOAN SCHEDULE
- AMOUNT
- ASK CLIENT
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the Few-Shot structure (Few-shot prompting). A few-shot prompt includes one or more worked examples of the input and the output you want, so the model can copy the pattern instead of guessing it.
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