At Pandle we’re striving to make taking care of your bookkeeping as close to waving a magic wand as possible. Simple, straightforward, accurate, and without the potential upset of sawing your assistant in half. Our latest update is another step in that direction, helping to make categorising transactions from bank imports even easier.
Start from the beginning – what are bank imports?
In lieu of actual magic, we try to make it as simple as possible for you to enter transactions in your bookkeeping. So, as well as timesaving Bank Feeds, Pandle has a Bank Imports tool that enables you to download statements from your bank account, and upload them as a CSV file. A few clicks, and hey presto your bank transactions will appear in Pandle! Shouting Pandle-cadabra is optional though.
Categorising your transactions
Assigning your transactions to categories is essential for making sure your bookkeeping stays organised. It also makes it easier to see what brings money into your business, and where it goes out, so you have the information you need to make your business run as efficiently as possible.
If you use the Bank Imports feature, then you’ll normally need to categorise your transactions after uploading them to Pandle. But some of our users told us that they prefer to download their bank statements, and then sort and categorise their transactions whilst they’re still in a spreadsheet. And, if that’s what some of you find easier, then that’s an option we want to offer!
Including categories in custom CSVs for Bank Imports
The new update means that you can do just that. To get started, you will need to create custom upload formats for your Bank Imports in Pandle which include a ‘Category’ heading.
When you upload the example file, Pandle will ask you to confirm what information appears under each column header so that Pandle can process your imports correctly. Simply select ‘Category’ from the dropdown menu, to tell Pandle what to match the data to.
Each time you download your bank statement you’ll be able to write in the categories (exactly as they appear in Pandle) for every transaction, and then Pandle will apply the category when you import the CSV file!
The category field will be blank, and Pandle will ask you to categorise transactions as normal if:
- You enter a category that doesn’t yet exist in Pandle (but adding new categories in Pandle is easy, so don’t worry)
- The category is written differently to how it appears in Pandle
- The category field doesn’t contain any information
That way there’s no danger of accidentally categorising transactions to weird and wonderful places, preventing confusion later on.
Get started with Pandle’s bookkeeping tools and create your free account, or test out Pandle Pro for a free 14 day trial – no card details necessary.
