The Scenario
It's the morning before payroll closes. Your payroll manager flagged a risk: 45 of the 200 bank account entries in the payroll workbook were submitted through a new self-service HR form that launched last month. No one verified them against actual bank records.
One failed payout to an employee on payday is a bad day. Forty-five unverified accounts is a meaningful chance of that happening.
The bad version:
- You search for a bank account validation tool, find one, and start pasting account numbers and bank codes one at a time.
- Fourteen entries in, the tool starts returning names that are abbreviations and you're not sure if "ADEBAYO O J" is close enough to "Oluwaseun James Adebayo" to count as a match.
- Around row 25 you realize the bank code column has had its leading zeros stripped by Excel's default number format — "044" became "44" — and the validation tool is rejecting them all.
45 rows of manual validation, each requiring its own lookup and judgment call, on a deadline that runs out at noon.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your account numbers and bank codes, runs each validation through Paystack's API, and writes the confirmed account name and validation status back to the workbook — so you have a clean, auditable record before the payout batch closes.
Read account number and bank code from my Excel 'Payroll' table and validate each one via Paystack — write the confirmed account name and validation status back into the adjacent columns.
What You Get
- Validation Status column: valid, invalid, or not found per row
- Confirmed Account Name column: the account name returned by Paystack for that number and bank
- Rows where validation fails get the reason written to the status column
- All 200 rows processed in one run — no separate tool, no manual lookup
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Bank codes have had leading zeros stripped by Excel
Pad the bank code column to 3 digits with leading zeros, then validate each account using the padded bank code and account number from the Payroll table — write validation status and confirmed account name to the adjacent columns.
You want to flag rows where the confirmed name doesn't closely match the employee name on record
Validate all accounts via Paystack, write the confirmed name and validation status back, then compare the confirmed name against the Employee Name column and mark 'NAME MISMATCH' in a flag column where they differ significantly.
Some account numbers may have been entered with spaces or hyphens
Clean account numbers by removing spaces and hyphens, pad bank codes to 3 digits, then validate each row via Paystack — write validation status and confirmed account name to the adjacent columns.
Clean account numbers, pad bank codes, validate, and flag mismatches in one shot
Remove spaces and hyphens from account numbers, pad bank codes to 3 digits, validate each row via Paystack, write validation status and confirmed account name to the adjacent columns, then compare confirmed names against the Employee Name column and mark 'MISMATCH' in a flag column where they differ.
Running the full validation before the batch closes means you catch the wrong account on row 31 — not after the transfer fails during the payout run.
Try It
Open the Excel payroll workbook where your bank account data lives, then Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to run bulk validation against Paystack. For related workflows, see how to bulk-create transfer recipients once accounts are validated, or how to initiate the bulk charge run.