How should an accounting practice handle month-end bank conversions for many clients?

Queue the whole month at once. The batch converter takes as many statements as you drop in, converts them one after another, and bundles every result into a single ZIP. Be clear on what that does and doesn't mean: files run sequentially, not in parallel, so thirty statements still take roughly thirty conversions' worth of time — the saving is that you aren't at the keyboard for any of it.

A workable practice routine looks like this. Collect each client's statement PDFs as they arrive rather than at month-end. Convert one client at a time, review the flagged rows — every line is checked against the running balance, so anything that doesn't tie out is marked rather than left for you to find. Then export Tally XML and import it into that client's company.

Where practices actually lose time is the reclassification pass afterwards, not the import. Two habits cut it down: convert a full month or quarter at once rather than week by week, because repeating payees then group together in the Suspense A/c listing and collapse into far fewer decisions; and keep each client's ledger naming consistent so the same narration maps to the same ledger every month. The Suspense A/c walkthrough covers the mechanics.

For clients on different software, the same conversion also exports to QuickBooks, Xero, and Excel or CSV — so a mixed client base doesn't mean a different tool per client.

One practical note on client-supplied files: statements that arrive as photographs of passbooks or branch printouts convert perfectly well, which is often the difference between a rural or co-operative bank client being workable and being a manual job.