I got tired of clients showing up with a year of uncategorized bank statements, so I built a tool that sorts them in seconds

I'm an accountant. Every tax season, small business clients would bring me a year's worth of bank statements and say "can you figure out what's deductible?"

The categorization process is mind-numbing. You're looking at hundreds of transactions — Starbucks (meals), Amazon (could be supplies, could be personal), random ACH transfers — and manually tagging each one. For a single client with 500 transactions, this takes 2-3 hours.

I kept thinking: most of these categories are obvious. Coffee shops are meals. Office Depot is supplies. The patterns repeat across every client.

So I built TaxSort — a browser-based tool where you paste a CSV export from any bank, and it categorizes transactions into standard tax categories (Schedule C, basically) using pattern matching.

How it works:

1. Export your bank transactions as CSV
2. Paste into TaxSort
3. It maps columns automatically and categorizes each transaction
4. Review, adjust any miscategorized ones
5. Export the categorized data

What I learned building it:

• Pattern matching beats AI for this use case. Bank transaction descriptions are messy but predictable. "AMZN" is always Amazon. "SQ *" is always Square. A good dictionary of 200+ merchant patterns catches 80% of transactions correctly.

• The free version drives the paid version. I put a free version on GitHub Pages with a 25-transaction limit. People try it, see it works, and the ones processing hundreds of transactions per client buy the full version ($29 on Gumroad).

• Single-file HTML tools are underrated. No server, no accounts, no data leaving the browser. For anything touching financial data, privacy is a feature.

Current state: Launched a few weeks ago. No sales yet (honestly), but the free version is getting some traffic. I also built a few related tools (InvoiceMatch for reconciliation, CashFlow Forecaster, DeadlineTracker) using the same single-file approach.

Try it free: https://taxsort-tools.github.io/taxsort (25 transactions, no signup)

I'm curious — for those of you building tools for accountants/bookkeepers/finance professionals: how are you finding customers? The profession is weirdly hard to reach online. They're not on Twitter, barely on Reddit, and most rely on word-of-mouth from other accountants. Any distribution tips would be huge.