The Scenario
You're three days into reconciling the accounts-payable sheet for this month's vendor payments. Someone pasted 340 IBAN numbers into column C from four different supplier onboarding forms — different countries, different formats, some with spaces, some without. The payment batch goes to the bank Friday.
The bad version:
- You open each IBAN in an online validator, copy-paste the result into column D, and realize on row 60 that this will take the rest of the afternoon
- You find a browser extension that promises bulk validation, install it, and discover it only handles 50 rows before asking you to upgrade
- You send the batch anyway and two payments return with formatting errors on Monday, triggering a correction cycle that requires sign-off from the finance director
The payment deadline doesn't move. The correction cycle does, and it's expensive in every direction.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the workbook, connects to Abstract API, and writes IBAN validation results back into your sheet without any scripting or manual lookups.
Here's the prompt:
Validate every IBAN in column C using Abstract API and write 'Valid' or 'Invalid' into column D
What You Get
- Column D:
ValidorInvalidfor every IBAN in column C - Invalid rows are clearly marked so you can filter them out before submitting to the bank
- Any rows where Abstract returns an unexpected response are flagged with a note rather than silently skipped
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The IBANs have spaces or dashes from different formatting conventions
Strip all spaces and dashes from the IBANs in column C, then validate each one with Abstract API and write 'Valid' or 'Invalid' into column D
Some IBANs are missing entirely — the supplier form had blank submissions
Validate all non-empty cells in column C with Abstract API, write 'Valid' or 'Invalid' into column D, and leave blank rows empty in column D with a note in column E saying 'Missing IBAN'
The suppliers are split across two sheets — domestic in one tab, international in another
Validate the IBANs in column C of the Domestic Suppliers tab and column B of the International Suppliers tab using Abstract API, and write 'Valid' or 'Invalid' results to column D of each respective tab
The full pre-payment sweep in one pass
Remove duplicate IBANs in column C, validate every unique IBAN with Abstract API, write 'Valid' or 'Invalid' into column D, and move all invalid rows to a separate tab called Payment Holds so the batch file only contains clean entries
One instruction handles the dedup, the validation, and the segregation — the batch file is ready to submit without a second round of filtering.
Try It
Open your supplier IBAN sheet and Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI — ask it to validate column C before Friday's payment run. You might also want to read: how to validate emails before a campaign send and the Abstract API hub overview.