This is a representative example based on outcomes commonly reported by accounting and bookkeeping teams. Figures are illustrative.
The team
A twelve-person accounting practice serving small and medium-sized businesses across retail, hospitality, and professional services. Like most firms its size, month-end was defined by one recurring chore: turning a stack of client bank statements — every bank, every format — into clean spreadsheets the team could reconcile.
The challenge
Statements arrived as PDFs, scans, and the occasional phone photo. Two staff members spent the first several days of every month manually keying transactions into Excel, line by line. The work was slow, easy to get wrong, and impossible to scale: taking on new clients meant more late nights, not more revenue. Typos in a single balance could cascade into hours of reconciliation troubleshooting.
The approach
The firm replaced manual keying with Extraly's bank statement to Excel conversion. The workflow became simple: upload each client's statements, let the AI detect the bank format and extract every transaction, then download a consistently structured Excel file. Because the output uses the same columns regardless of the originating bank, the team's reconciliation template worked on the first pass — no re-mapping per client. For clients whose data fed other software, the team used the CSV export to import directly into their accounting platform.
The results
- ~90% less time spent on statement data entry — a multi-day task became a same-day one.
- Fewer reconciliation errors, because transcription mistakes were largely eliminated and totals were validated on extraction.
- Capacity to take on new clients without adding headcount, turning month-end from a bottleneck into a routine step.
What changed for the team
The most valuable outcome wasn't the hours saved — it was what those hours were spent on instead. Staff who had been transcribing numbers moved to advisory work and client review, the higher-value services the firm actually wanted to grow. The document stopped being the bottleneck, and the whole month-end process moved faster because of it.