Upload. Parse. Match. Automatically.

Why Nigerian statements are hard

There is no common format. Column order, date format, how credits and debits are distinguished, whether the balance is running or per-page, whether the narration is one field or three — all vary by bank, and sometimes by which channel you downloaded from. A parser that works on one bank's export fails on the next.

The narration field is the other problem. A transfer might read as the sender's name, a reference number, a truncated description, or all three concatenated. Matching that to an invoice requires interpretation rather than lookup, which is exactly what pattern matching is good at and exact-match rules are not.

What reconciliation actually establishes

• Every payment you believe you received actually landed.
• Every payment that landed is attributed to the right invoice, so your ageing is real.
• Every outgoing is recorded as an expense in the right category and period.
• Nothing appears twice — the most common source of an overstated month.
• Anything unexplained is visible as unexplained rather than silently absorbed.

That last point is the one worth insisting on. An unmatched transaction is information: a client who paid a different amount, a duplicate charge, a subscription nobody remembers, or occasionally something worse. Forcing it to a category to make the month balance destroys the signal.

A monthly rhythm that survives a busy month

1. Download the statement on the first working day of the month, for the month just ended.
2. Upload and let matching run; most transactions will attach to an invoice or a known recurring expense.
3. Work only the exceptions. On a typical small business that is a few dozen lines, not hundreds.
4. Resolve unmatched incoming payments first — those are invoices you may still be chasing unnecessarily.
5. File the statement with the month. When a question arrives in June about March, the answer takes minutes.

Why this matters more from 2026

NRS e-invoicing assumes structured, machine-readable records. The reforms in the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 make nearly every relief conditional on being able to evidence something. Both point the same way: reconstruction after the fact stops being viable, and a monthly habit stops being optional.