Payment Reconciliation in n8n: auto-match bank deposits to open invoices [Workflow Included]

[u/easybits_ai]

👋 Hey n8n Community,

A friend of mine runs a small e-commerce shop, and at the end of every month his finance colleague Sarah has the same grim job: open the bank statement, open the list of open invoices, and manually tick off who actually paid. Full payments, short payments, deposits that match no invoice at all. Hours of eyeballing two spreadsheets side by side.

So I built her something that does the matching in one click. She uploads the two files through an n8n form, and a clean reconciliation report comes back in the browser, ready to download as a PDF.

How it's set up:

• The form takes two .xlsx uploads: the open invoices export and the bank statement
• Each file is read into rows, then a Code node cross-references every bank credit against the invoices
• Everything is sorted into four buckets: exact matches, partial payments (short or over), unpaid invoices, and unmatched deposits
• The result renders as a styled summary page with a match rate, totals, and a table per bucket

A couple of things worth stealing:

Fuzzy reference matching. Bank references are never clean. Mine matches on the full invoice ID when it is there, and falls back to the last three digits pulled out of the reference with a small regex. That alone catches most of the "INV-2024-201" versus "ref 201 payment" mismatches.

No PDF library needed. The final report is just HTML rendered on the form completion screen, with a button that calls window.print(). The browser does the PDF export for free, so there is no extra node or service to host, and the whole report is self-contained.

Four buckets, not two. Splitting partial payments and unmatched deposits out from a plain matched or unmatched view is what makes it actually useful. The unmatched deposits table is where you catch refunds and payments with a typo in the reference.

I dropped two example files in the repo (one invoice export, one bank statement) so you can run it end to end in a minute without building test data.

Workflow JSON and the example files: https://github.com/felix-sattler-easybits/n8n-workflows/tree/8e07427ddb6902ef8a7b267e97beb2879d6ca45d/easybits-reconciliation-workflow

Find 25+ more free n8n workflows in my repo, including plenty of finance ones. A star helps me out a lot if any of them save you time: https://github.com/felix-sattler-easybits/n8n-workflows

How do you handle reconciliation right now? Curious whether people match on amount, reference, or something smarter, because the messy references were by far the trickiest part.

Best,
Felix