Import bank statement - "Reference" field no longer recognized

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21

I normally create bank transactions from CSV files with date, description, reference, and amount. I use several automatic rules to normalize the transaction before importing, and it has so far been working fine.

Now, I just found out that the reference field from the CSV is no longer being imported, and instead, it is pre-pended to the description of the bank transaction.

The result is that general ledger transactions for cash and cash equivalent accounts are very convoluted - the bank description, which usually comes out from the bank a mess, now has a reference prepended to it. For example, one of the lines in the general ledger transaction report (just the date, description, amount, and the running balance on the account):

2026-01-02 — COMPANY — 5234270 AUTOMATED PAYMENT - OUR COMPANY LOAN ADM LOAN PAYMT 4768112890 9,329.51 53,180.63 Dr

Repeat that for thousands of lines in a report, and you get the picture.

What is your recommendation for a workflow to produce a cleaner report? Anything that could be done to decouple the description of the CSV from the report with rules, or additional CSV fields, or maybe a report configuration option?

Thanks for your time, and congratulations on the product.

22

I had to stop using the “Import bank statement” feature as it just doesn’t work without an “External Reference” field for me. The workaround that I found was to create the Payments and Receipts in google sheet and then use the bulk create feature. This way I can add my own Reference value in the same way as it used to work via the import bank statement earlier.

Don’t think the “External Reference” field will be added - the topic was never added in ideas.

23

My other post titled “How to improve general ledger transaction presentation?” was merged into this post, but I don’t think they address the same issue.

This post is on the reference field; the other post is asking for best practices on how to live with the current general ledger transaction report when you have a convoluted description (the convoluted description is partially a result of the prepending of references, but mainly a result of how banks use descriptions to send all kinds of garbage).