Before you reconcile a bank account, you open the bank's file in a spreadsheet and fix it. You move the date column, delete the running balance, turn a column of withdrawals into negatives, and save the result under a new name so your software will take it. Then you check your books against that file as if the bank had sent it that way.
It feels like housekeeping, and it keeps housekeeping's hours: a small job per account, every month, for every account you run. The operating account, the deposit account, one per owner in some portfolios, each from a bank with its own idea of where a date belongs.
The hours are the cheap part. A reconciliation works because it holds two independent records of the same money against each other: what the bank says moved, and what your ledger says moved. The bank's file is the one document in your books you did not write, and that is the whole of its value.
The edits are the kind that go wrong quietly. A sign flipped on the wrong rows turns a withdrawal into a deposit. A spreadsheet reads 03/04 as March or as April without asking which you meant. A row deleted along with the blank ones around it was a transaction. None of these announces itself as an error. Each arrives weeks later as a difference you cannot explain, in the one exercise that exists to explain differences, and you go looking for it in the ledger, because the statement is the side you trust.
Then there is the question of who knows how. The order of the steps, which columns go, which bank needs what: it lives in one person's hands, it is written down nowhere, and it is the first thing to break when that person is away at month end.
Every fix you make to the bank's file makes it a little less the bank's.
Stop moving the columns and say where they are. This column is the date, that one is the description, money out is the column headed Debit. The running balance stays in the file and goes unread. No sign is flipped by hand and nothing is retyped, and the choice is made on a screen, the same way, by whoever is doing the month. What little is left to change is how a value is written, a currency symbol stripped or a separator swapped, never the value.
What cannot be read is counted. A totals row at the foot of the file, a line with a stray symbol in its amount: you are told how many rows were left out, and you can account for each of them before the first line is matched. The difference you find at the end of the reconciliation is then a difference between the bank and your books, with no third hand in it.
Scaalr's bank statement import previews the file, asks which column holds the date, the description, and the amount, reads one signed column or separate debit and credit columns, and reports the rows it skipped. The layouts banks export, the two columns that stop an import, and the eight-step procedure are in How to Import a Bank Statement CSV From Any Bank.
For the complete guide to bringing in a bank's file as it came, see: How to Import a Bank Statement CSV From Any Bank.
The first 5 units are free, then $0.99 a unit a month, and bank statement import is on every plan.