# Bookkeeper · Post 2 — Tip

**Where to post:** LinkedIn (your own feed), AAT/ICB Facebook
groups, accountancy newsletters' "tip submission" inboxes.

**Format:** short, ~150 words. Practical. Reads as "thing I learned"
not "thing I'm selling".

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## Title

The 30-second check that catches 90% of bank-export errors before they hit QuickBooks

## Body

If you do client bank reconciliations, do this once before every import:

Open the export. Sort by amount. Scroll to the bottom. Look at the totals row.

Most banks add a totals row at the bottom of the CSV that *isn't* a transaction. If you import it, QuickBooks treats it as a real entry and your books are off by exactly the value of the totals row — usually a five-figure number that takes you 40 minutes to track down.

Same trick catches blank rows the bank inserts as section breaks (especially Wells Fargo, Chase, and most UK challenger banks). One sort, one scroll, two seconds of looking — saves the rest of your evening.

If you're doing this for 20+ clients a month and want to automate the whole pre-import scrub (this trick + ~10 others), I built a $49 desktop tool called DataTools that does it: datatools.gumroad.com. No subscription, runs locally so client data stays on your machine.

— {{your-name}}