Bank statements

Most of your books come from bank statements. You upload one, Financials proposes an account for every line, and nothing is posted until you approve it. Bookkeepers can do all of this; see Roles & permissions.

Uploading a statement

1. Open Uploads.
2. Under Upload bank statement (CSV or OFX), choose the Bank account the statement belongs to.
3. Click Choose file and pick the CSV or OFX file your bank exported. QFX and QBO files work too.
4. Check the preview before anything is imported (see below).
5. Click Upload.

Financials reads the file in your browser first and shows you what it found. For a CSV it maps the columns to Date, Description, Amount (or separate Debit and Credit columns) and Balance. Change any that are wrong, and set Money out shown as to Negative numbers or Positive numbers to match your bank. If the mapping isn't obvious, Suggest mapping with AI sends the column names and the first 10 rows to the assistant, which fills the mapping in for you to check. Nothing is imported until you click Upload.

Some banks put a few lines above the transactions, like the account number and the statement period. Financials skips those until it finds the column headings or the first dated row. Commas and semicolons both work as separators, and dates like 02-Aug-21 or 02-Aug-2021 are read as day, month and year.

Type a name into Save mapping as… to reuse the mapping. The next file with the same columns picks it up on its own.

Checking the balances

When the file has a balance column, the preview shows the Opening and Closing balances, Money in and Money out, and a Statement check that opening plus the transactions reaches the closing balance. Books before statement compares the statement's opening balance with what your books say the account held the day before. If it differs, a statement in between is probably missing or something was posted twice.

Duplicates

Uploading the same lines twice is safe. Lines that were already imported are skipped, and the message after the upload says how many. If you upload the exact same file again, Financials warns you first and you can click Upload anyway.

The list on Uploads shows each statement's period and balances, and a Continuity badge that compares it with the previous statement for the same account:

Categorising

After the upload you land on the statement's review screen. Click Categorise n lines with AI to propose an account for every line. It runs in the background, so you can leave the page and come back; the button shows its progress.

Each proposal comes from one of three places, checked in this order:

1. Rule: one of your categorisation rules matched the line.
2. Memory: you categorised a line like it before. Its tooltip says "Learned from your earlier choice".
3. AI: the assistant chose an account from your chart, with a confidence score. When nothing in your chart fits, it suggests a new account you can create in one click.

Before any of that, money-in lines that match a payment already recorded in Looped Invoices are settled against that payment, so the receipt isn't booked twice.

Reviewing and approving

Approving a line posts it to the ledger. Until then it's only a proposal.

• Approve one line: check the account, then press ⌘+⏎ (Ctrl+Enter), or use the row's menu.
• Approve the confident ones: Approve all ≥ 90% approves every proposal the AI is at least 90% sure of.
• Approve a batch: tick lines (or press Space on a row), pick an account in Search an account to assign… and click Assign if you want to change it, then click Approve n.
• Exclude a line that shouldn't be in the books, such as a transfer you post another way: press ⌘+⌫, or use Exclude n for a batch.
• Split across accounts… posts one bank line to several accounts, for example a card payment that covers two kinds of expense.

The review screen works from the keyboard. Click a row or press ↓ to start, use ↑ and ↓ to move, and just type to change the row's account to the best match. Enter opens the full account search.

The filter above the table narrows the list to To review, To review · under 90%, Matched a rule, AI suggested, Not categorised, Posted or Excluded, and the search box finds lines by description, amount, date or account.

Changing a posted line

Pick a different account on a posted line and choose Reclassify to the picked account. Financials reverses the original entry and posts a new one, so the history stays intact. Reverse and exclude takes a posted line back out of the books.

If a line falls in a VAT201 period that's already finalised, Financials won't approve it to an account that carries VAT until you reopen that return on the VAT page.

Matches Financials offers

Some bank lines pay for something that's already in the books. For these the review screen offers a match instead of a new expense, and Confirm (or Settle) posts the payment against it.

Categorisation rules

Rules categorise the lines you see every month, like bank fees or a software subscription, without asking the AI. They're checked top to bottom on every categorisation run, and the first rule that matches a line wins.

To create one:

• From the review screen, open a line's menu and choose Create rule from this line.
• Or open Uploads → Categorisation rules and click New rule.

A rule has:

Preview on this upload (or Preview on recent lines) shows which lines the rule would catch before you save it. On the rules page you can move rules up and down to change their order, switch a rule off, test it against recent lines, or delete it. Deleting a rule doesn't change lines already posted.

A new rule applies to future uploads. To run your rules over lines still open on a statement you're reviewing, click Apply rules on that statement.

Deleting an upload

Open the statement, click the ⋯ menu and choose Delete upload. If any of its lines were posted, the button reads Delete upload and entries and removes those entries too.