ZeraBooks Guides

General ledger software turns each line on your bank statement into a double-entry record: one side hits the bank account, the other side hits the account that explains it, like rent, a customer's payment, or a loan. Good general ledger software does that posting for you and shows you the result, so the ledger, trial balance and reports all come from the same entries. People hear "general ledger" and picture something only an accountant opens. It's simpler than that. Here's one real line followed all the way through. One statement line, start to finish On September 19, our demo company Northgate Landscaping paid $1,240 to John Deere Financial. On the bank statement it's one cryptic line: CHECKCARD 0918 JOHN DEERE FINANCIAL 800-6334410 IA . The same line inside ZeraBooks: paid from the checking account (1060), posted to Notes Payable - Equipment. Northgate Landscaping is a demo company; captured Nov 8, 2026. What the general ledger records: Account Debit...

Put every month in one sheet, then check the seams: each statement's closing balance must equal the next statement's opening balance, and any transaction dated on the last day of one statement must not appear again on the first day of the next. ZeraBooks does both when you download several statements together as one file, with an Account column so different accounts don't mix. Where double rows come from Statement periods don't always line up with calendar months. A statement that runs Jan 22 to Feb 21 and the next one from Feb 22 to Mar 21 is clean. But people often mix sources: a PDF statement for January and a CSV export for "February" that actually starts Feb 1. Now Feb 1 to Feb 21 is in the sheet twice. Here's a seam check that catches it, for a cafe's account: January statement closes Jan 31 at 6,240.10 February statement opens Feb 1 at 6,240.10 Transactions in the sheet dated Feb 1 to Feb 28: total net +1,880.45 February printed closing: 7,120.5...

It's easy to work out for your own firm: clients times accounts times pages, times the minutes per page you actually spend typing and checking. For a firm with 40 monthly clients, two accounts each and four-page statements, that's 320 pages a month. At three minutes a page it's 16 hours a month, about two working days, every month, before anyone does real accounting. ZeraBooks turns that into an upload and a check of anything flagged. The worked example This is an example, not a survey. Plug in your own numbers. Monthly clients: 40 Accounts per client (checking plus a card, say): 2 Pages per statement: 4 Pages a month: 40 × 2 × 4 = 320 Minutes per page to type, sort and check: 3 Hours a month: 320 × 3 ÷ 60 = 16 At a staff cost of $35 an hour, that's $560 a month in statement work alone. In tax season, when catch-up clients arrive with twelve months each, it can triple. Where the time actually goes Typing is the obvious part. The hidden part is fixing: Reversed signs fro...

No, not on its own. A 99% character accuracy still means roughly one wrong digit per hundred, and a busy three-page statement can easily hold 400 to 600 digits in its amounts and balances. That's four to six wrong digits per statement, and you don't know which. What makes OCR safe for bank statements isn't a higher accuracy number; it's checking the result against totals the bank already printed. ZeraBooks does that for every statement before download. The math people skip Take a modest business checking statement: 80 transactions, each with an amount and a running balance, plus the summary box. 80 amounts at about 6 digits each: 480 digits 80 balances at about 6 digits each: 480 digits Summary: about 40 digits That's about 1,000 digits. At 99%, about 10 could be wrong. At 99.9%, about 1. One wrong digit in the wrong place, a 1 read as a 7 in the thousands, and the month is off by 6,000. Why the balance check catches it A statement is a closed system. Opening balanc...

Because Hubdoc's statement extraction is built to feed Xero or QuickBooks, and those only need date, description and amount. Hubdoc's own support article lists exactly those columns for debit statements (credit statements add a transaction date). That's fine for an import. It's a problem when you want to check the file, because the running balance is how you find a missing or doubled row. ZeraBooks keeps the balance and proves every account against the printed balances before you download. What the balance column is for A bank statement prints a balance after each transaction or each day. That column is a free audit trail. If row 40 is missing, the balance on row 41 won't follow from row 39. Drop the column and the only check left is the grand total. A grand total can hide two errors that cancel out. What Hubdoc's rules say From Hubdoc's support page on bank statement extraction (read November 2026): Canada and U.S. statements only, in English One statement ...

Not as one file. Dext's own help page says to upload one statement for a single account per file, and every page of a processed statement counts toward your extraction allowance, including pages with no transactions, like cheque images. So a combined checking-and-savings statement has to be split before Dext sees it. ZeraBooks takes the combined PDF as it comes, splits it by account, and proves each account against its own opening and closing balance. Why this comes up so often Plenty of banks send combined statements. Citi puts checking, savings and CDs in one monthly PDF if the customer asked for it. Credit unions often show share savings and share draft in one document. Business owners with a payroll account and an operating account at the same bank get one statement. For a bookkeeper, splitting those by hand is the dull part: find where account two starts, print to PDF, rename the files, upload twice. What it costs in Dext Dext's Bank Statement Extraction add-on is priced p...

The best Nanonets alternative for bank statements is one that checks its own work against the balances printed on the statement, so you don't have to compare rows with the PDF by eye. ZeraBooks does that on every statement, per account, and only marks it proven when it ties to the cent. I founded ZeraBooks; the Nanonets facts below are from Nanonets' own pages, read on November 5, 2026. What does Nanonets say to do after it converts a statement? Nanonets' bank statement converter page claims "99%+ accuracy" without saying how that's measured. Each extracted transaction links back to its spot on the statement, which they call "Verify with source links". Exports are XLSX, CSV and JSON. Then the FAQ says the quiet part. Review and validate the data by comparing the rows against the original PDF. It calls that step crucial. I agree it's crucial. I just don't think a person should be doing it row by row. Why is the statement's own balance a be...

If most of your AutoEntry credits go to bank statements, you are paying 3 credits a page, and the plan you need is three times bigger than your page count suggests. At 500 statement pages a month that's AutoEntry's Diamond plan at $298. The same 500 pages fit inside ZeraBooks' converter plan at $79 a month billed annually, which covers 1,000 pages. (I'm Damin, I founded ZeraBooks. The AutoEntry numbers below come from AutoEntry's own pricing and help pages, checked November 5, 2026.) If your AutoEntry bill keeps climbing and you haven't added clients, look at your statement pages first. That's where the multiplier lives. How does AutoEntry count a bank statement? AutoEntry's pricing page says a bank statement costs 3 credits per page. Its help article on uploading statements adds the detail that catches people: you're charged 3 credits for every page you upload, including blank pages, summary pages and notes pages. Duplicates are flagged, but the cre...