How long does it take to categorise 500 bank transactions? We timed it

How long does it take to categorise a few hundred bank transactions? Most answers you'll find online are estimates. We had the chance to measure one.

In October 2026, a small UK limited company on Ledgers had about ten weeks of bank transactions waiting for review. They were cleared over two evenings: 486 transactions in 2 hours 32 minutes, from the first approval to the last. That's about 19 seconds a transaction.

Published estimates for coding transactions by hand in Xero or QuickBooks run from about 30 seconds to 3 minutes each. For the same 486 transactions, that's roughly 4 to 24 hours. This article shows where the 2 hours 32 minutes went, and what the comparison figures are based on.

What we measured

Each of the 486 was approved by a person, one at a time. Nothing was bulk-approved. The second evening also included entering two supplier bills, setting up two fixed assets and a few breaks. We've left all of it in the total.

Spread over the ten weeks the transactions covered, that's about 15 minutes a week.

Where the time went

Each transaction arrived in the review queue with a suggested category, or, in 14 cases, a note saying the AI wasn't sure. Some suggestions came from rules, which Ledgers learns as you approve things. The rest came from the AI, which suggests a category for anything no rule covers, including suppliers it hasn't seen before.

"Typical" here is the median: the time from one approval to the next, which includes reading the next transaction. Three in four changes took under 30 seconds.

A few other details from the log:

• Of the 325 rule matches, 296 came from rules built up in Ledgers since June. The other 29 came from rules carried over from the company's old Xero history.
• The 14 where the AI wasn't sure are among the 92 changes. Rather than guess, it asked for a category.
• 390 of the 486 came with a VAT treatment already suggested, alongside the category.

The pattern is the point. Accepting a good suggestion takes seconds. The time goes on the transactions that need thought, and there the job is to choose an answer, not to type one.

How long would this take in Xero or QuickBooks?

No one has published a measured, independent figure for time per transaction in Xero or QuickBooks. What exists are estimates from bookkeepers and from software companies. Here are the ones we could trace to a named source:

Two of these sources, ReconcileIQ and Growthy, sell AI bookkeeping software, so they have a reason to stress how slow manual work is. ReconcileIQ's own figures also differ widely between its two articles: 45 seconds on average in one, 2 to 3 minutes in the other. Read them as a range, not a verdict.

Transactions that a bank rule already matches are much quicker everywhere. Xero is testing an automatic bank reconciliation feature, still in beta, and its blog quotes a user who did "300 transactions in about five minutes" with it. That fits our own numbers: a rule match took us about 3 seconds too.

So the honest comparison is this:

• Against an experienced bookkeeper with mature bank rules, 19 seconds is still quicker than the fastest published estimate of 30 seconds for a simple transaction, and our figure covers every transaction, simple or not.
• Against careful manual coding, or a first year with no rules, the gap is large: hours rather than minutes.
• The difference is the transactions no rule covers. In Xero or QuickBooks, a supplier with no rule or history often means working out the category and VAT yourself, though both now offer AI suggestions too. Here, 69 transactions that no rule covered arrived with a suggestion that was accepted, in about 5 seconds each.

What about Xero's and Intuit's own claims?

Both companies publish headline savings. Xero's UK site says "Win back 22+ hours a month" and quotes "97% reconciliation accuracy", without saying how either was measured. Intuit's UK press release for QuickBooks says businesses "can save up to 12 hours a month". Its footnote explains that 45% of customers saved 12 hours, in a survey Intuit commissioned of US QuickBooks Online customers. Neither figure tells you how long a given number of transactions takes, so we haven't used them in the comparison.

What it would cost in a bookkeeper's time

The best recent UK source on rates we found is a survey of 131 UK bookkeepers in summer 2025, published by The 6 Figure Bookkeeper with GoProposal by Sage. It found a median hourly rate of £33.36. At that rate:

The survey doesn't say whether its rates include VAT, and many bookkeepers charge a monthly fee instead. The median monthly fee was £150.50 for routine bookkeeping.

You stay in control

Speed doesn't come from handing the books over. Every one of the 486 transactions was approved by a person, and 92 of them were given a different category, typically in about 16 seconds each. The AI does the typing and the first answer; you make the decision. Every approval is recorded in Ledgers' activity log, which is where the figures in this article come from.

What makes the difference

Looking at the log, three things saved most of the time:

1. Most transactions arrived with an answer. 81% were accepted as suggested, in seconds.
2. The suggestions improve as you approve. Each approval feeds the rules, so the next batch has more rule matches and fewer questions. 296 of the matches here came from rules built up in Ledgers over the previous four months.
3. The AI says when it isn't sure. Fourteen times it asked rather than guessed, so it was clear exactly where to slow down.

If you want to see how this works on your own books, our guide to categorising bank transactions automatically explains the rules and the review queue. How Ledgers compares with Xero covers prices and features side by side.

On the Free plan you can connect one bank account and see how many of your own transactions arrive already categorised, up to 15 a month. Start free.

Our figures come from Ledgers' activity log for one business's review on 13 and 14 October 2026. Sources for the comparison, as at 15 October 2026: ReconcileIQ, auto-categorising bank transactions and categorising transactions in QuickBooks Online; Growthy, the cost of manual bookkeeping; Xero, auto bank reconciliation updates and AI in accounting; Intuit, UK press release of 20 November 2025; The 6 Figure Bookkeeper, UK bookkeeping pricing report.