Improve Bank Statement Imports

Idea suggested by Andy Gambles 12 years ago

The bank statement imports system is frankly horrendous. It is completely non-user friendly.

I enter the majority of transactions manually as they occur. If I then import the bank statement matching them up to the manually entered transactions takes AGES!

I also have a FreeAgent account for another business. importing that bank statement takes about 10 seconds! It auto-reconciles the transactions already in place based on matching descriptions and amounts. If i import transactions that overlap a previous import it just says "x transactions ignored already imported" Clearbooks goes crazy with warnings and date selections making no effort to explain what I should do.

It is actually quicker for me to just manually enter and reconcile transactions than use the import tool!

4 Replies

I would love to see an 'intelligent' allocation (or even better the ability to opt into this facility) when allocating payments/receipts to a supplier/customer. This means that CB would 'guess' an allocation based on oldest being first and also trying to match to use all of the amount exactly, rather than the current system where the full value is put against every invoice so you have to apply manually

Now that Clear Books has its £800k investment, hopefully the company will invest some of it to improve the user experience.

I had a meeting with Barclays on Friday and they showed me how they bundle Freeagent with various other items in its "MyBusinessWorks" package. Sadly with the likes of Freeagent and Xero in the market pushing cloud based accounting as a real alternative at competitive prices it is becoming more and more difficult for me to justify to my clients why they should choose Clear Books over the other packages - and I have been a Clear Books partner and advocate for about 4 years so I want things to improve rather than me to move my clients.

Hopefully Tim and the others at Clear Books Mansions will take this on board (they usually do)

Any existing manually entered transaction can be reconciled with a bank feed/import transaction. Existing transactions are suggested for reconciliation by default. See this support guide for more information.

The bank statement import process has detected duplicates for many years too.

In fact matching them up to existing manually entered transactions is IMPOSSIBLE. You either have to select who the payment came from or went to which means I then have to open clearbooks in another tab to look up who the customer or supplier is.

At least FreeAgent lists all the possible transactions it could relate to.

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