How many hours does a small accounting firm spend on bank statements?

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 from banks that print every amount positive
  • Year-less dates on statements that cross December and January
  • Combined statements that need splitting by account
  • The one missing page that shows up three weeks later at reconciliation

What changes with a checked converter

The typing goes to zero. The checking mostly goes to zero too, if the converter proves each statement against the bank's printed balances, because then staff only look at the statements that didn't tie.

A firm's client list with each client's statements

ZeraBooks costs $79 a month billed annually for 1,000 pages, which covers the 320 pages above three times over, and includes the AI general ledger for the clients you keep books for.

More on how firms use it: https://www.zerabooks.com/for-accountants

I founded ZeraBooks. Run your own numbers first; if they're small, you may not need anything.

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