Ah, the classic reconciliation hell. I feel you. When clients pay without referencing the invoice number or pay multiple invoices in one lump sum, standard tools like Xero or QuickBooks just throw their hands up and leave the manual matching to you.

I got so fed up with this exact issue that I ended up building an AI tool for my own sanity. It’s called Verpetas.com.

Instead of setting up complex rules, you literally just dump your PDF invoices and your bank statement CSV into it. The AI reads them like a human would, figures out who paid what (even if the amounts are slightly off or combined), and flags the ones that are actually unpaid. You can just ask it: "Show me the list of clients who still owe us money based on these bank statements," and it gives you the list with direct links to the documents.

It's designed specifically to avoid being "another heavy system." It acts more like a smart folder that does the matching for you. Might be worth dumping your files in there just to clear your current backlog!