How do I import my expenses CSV?

Question asked by Maria Ingold 10 years ago

Hi,

All my historic expenses data is in a CSV file with the following fields:

  • Date
  • Paid To
  • Details
  • Description
  • Net
  • VAT
  • Gross

I have imported my bank account data and reconciled it. I want to do the same for expenses. How do I do that?

Kindest regards, Maria

7 Replies

I'm afraid you can't bulk import anything into Purchases > Expenses.

My option was a workaround.

You could import the expenses via csv as bills (makes no difference accounting wise) then you could either:

  1. Pay said bills directly from your bank account in the usual fashion
  2. Pay all bill to the DLA then analyse the subsequent bank transactions to yourself as transfers to the DLA - the two would cancel each other out

I Maria

I'm presuming these are expenses you've paid out of your own pocket and subsequently reclaimed from the company as opposed to paying them directly from the business account in the first instance?

Yes, these are historic expenses I paid out of my own pocket and then was reimbursed by the company. Otherwise these would already be in my business bank account data which is separate and already imported.

Just wanted to make sure...

As far as i'm aware, there's no way of importing expenses in the traditional form.

Here's what I would do....

  1. Money > Import Tool > Import
  2. Select your DLA from the dropdown
  3. Import your csv as though it's a bank statement
  4. Explain away as you would any other statement import

All payments will then be created to your directors' account which is presumably where you've taken the money from when refunding yourself?

Hmm. My director's loan account is "virtual" not physical. I refund myself "physically" from my business current account.

Ok so you've already reconciled your bank statement - how did you analyse the payments you've physically made to yourself?

I created myself as an employee.

Then I pay [my employee name]:

  • Adminstrative expenses > Salaries
  • Current Liabilities > [my employee name] Expenses

I think that for Expenses it creates a BILL that I pay, which is the total value of all the expenses for that month.

So for items older than 2014, I've just reconciled the Bank Statement and paid myself the expense.

I'm having to manually enter individual expenses for 2014 and 2015 into the Purchases > Expenses > Create system.

The reason is that that flags up the "type" of expense which is used to generate the data used for my Annual Accounts, which I want Clearbooks to be able to auto-generate from the data.

What I had wanted was for Purchases > Expenses > Create to be able to automatically import that data from a CSV and then reconcile it like a bank account import, but there's no way to import the data into the Expenses section.

Kindest regards, Maria

What I've done is just pay

I'm afraid you can't bulk import anything into Purchases > Expenses.

My option was a workaround.

You could import the expenses via csv as bills (makes no difference accounting wise) then you could either:

  1. Pay said bills directly from your bank account in the usual fashion
  2. Pay all bill to the DLA then analyse the subsequent bank transactions to yourself as transfers to the DLA - the two would cancel each other out

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