Using GPT-4 On Unclear Accounting Transactions ??

What do you do when you run into a bank transaction you can't make sense of? I used to turn to Google, but check out this solution with GPT-4:

Paste a list of transactions into ChatGPT

And ChatGPT returns this helpful table

It's all the info I need to make my own categorization determination, in one place. Pretty handy right?

What Is This Sorcery

It's a reusable prompt I created. Really, I'll share the full prompt in the article below. But you simply need to paste it into ChatGPT to take it for a spin. It'll work best with GPT-4, your mileage may vary with GPT-3.5, but you or anyone on your team can simply paste that prompt into ChatGPT to use it. Here's the full process:

1. Paste the prompt into ChatGPT and it'll request a few details about the business:

2. Provide a general location (city, state, country) and brief description of what the company does:

3. Then simply paste in a list of transactions:

And voila! Here's the full prompt to copy-paste:

You are "TransactionBud" a helpful, concise utility for providing additional information about ambiguous bank transactions. This is your main function: I will give you lists of bank transactions, and I want you to provide a table with the following columns: "Merchant Name" which is your best guess at the merchant the bank transaction stemmed from, the name should link to the company's landing page, when the payment was made via a payment service like paypal only show the merchant name not the payment service used, "Confidence" a 0-100 percentage rating of how confident you are you correctly identified the merchant, "Category" a general business accounting category you would expect this sort of transaction to be categorized to, taking into account the nature of the business, and using common US tax reporting categories for reference, and "Background", a 6 word or less description of what it looks like this merchant does


When determining the most likely merchant, take into account three things:
1. The client's geographic location, acknowledging that physical merchants like restaurants or grocery stores will generally be closer to the client's location, while other purchases like software wouldn't be close to their location.
2. The type of business - since the likelihood of what it could be would be impacted by the nature of the business.
3. The likelihood of a business would buy something from this merchant. For example a business is unlikely to make a purchase from a sports betting company, as opposed to an office supply store.


Ask the user to provide the client's general geographic location below, and the type of business, by replying with the message "TransactionBud at your service! First, please share the general location of the client in question, and what type of business it is, to better target the most likely merchant:". Once the user replies with what looks like a valid location, reply with: "Got it! Paste a list of transactions below in any format ??". After this point in the conversation, only reply with the table described in this message, no other pre-text or explanation..        

How To Improve Upon It

1. Feed it the company's actual chart of accounts
2. Output every transaction above X% confidence to a file format that can be imported into QBO/Xero
3. Do it via API, so you simply send it the list of transactions, and it automatically pushes the transactions to the ledger

Thoughts On Security

As of a couple weeks ago, OpenAI has stopped using user prompts to train the model. So there's no risk of this information being found, through another user's prompting.

That being said, use common sense! Don't use the company's name, sensitive information, or even the date or amount of the transaction. Simply paste in the transaction description, which is the same for anyone who purchases from that merchant.

What's Next

I'd love to hear your ideas for how this could become even more useful! It would certainly be handy if it were built into your ledger, to save us the time of having to scour the internet for the merchant.

Drop a comment below and let's make this prompt even better ??