I offer one last piece of advice. Export bank statements for very short periods initially and work in a test company. That way, you can experiment and undo.
Oh I plan to make a backup donāt worry.
Update on Bank Reconciliation.
I have now been importing bank statements for the last six weeks and I am amazed at how quickly all the work is done. I no longer have to create payments or receipts manually and worry about cleared or pending. Even for the very small number of transactions that I do, it is saving me time as I no longer have to spend any time trying to get the balances to match.
I just do an import and it shows my balances before and after import and I can see immediately that it matches the balance in Manager before import and the bank statement after import. There is no longer anything to reconcile anymore. All I use the reconciliation tab is to import the monthly bank statement!
Absolutely brilliant!
I will make two points though:
I would recommend a feature request that the contact field is one of the fields that you can fill for the Bank Rule as the Contact will always be the same for that Bank Rule. I donāt know why Bank Rules does not contain this field by default?
Second thing that I would highly recommend is that the Manager documentation be updated to advise users that while they can do new receipt and new payment (doing it manually), rather point people to importing the bank statement weekly/fortnightly or monthly and explain to people that when you import the bank statement it fills in the payment/receipt for you and automatically reconciles your bank account and stress how much time it will save by using some examples to show how fast and easy it is.
I learnt accounting at school and obviously in those days, we didnāt have the internet and we never imported bank statements, so I never learnt the concepts behind importing the bank statement and automatic reconciliation, so I stuck with what I knew which is creating a purchase or sales invoice and then when I spent/received money, I recorded the transaction by going into payments or receipts.
It may seem obvious to people like you who have been doing bank imports and bank rules for many years, but if you have never done it, you tend to stick with what you are familiar with especially as I never really understood how Automatic Bank Reconciliation worked because I had never used it and the concepts were not familiar to me. I also assumed that I had so few transactions compared to other businesses that it would not save me any time (How wrong I was).
Over the last few years, I have wasted a lot of hours manually reconciling my bank account with Manager and doing the payment/receipts manually as well as changing the dates of payments/receipts because of pending and processed time lags. I was always having to find that errant transaction or two that I had forgotten to put in a few weeks back. Now this is no longer an issue with Bank Rules and the bulk import.
I would highly recommend that the documentation stresses that while you can make payments and receipts manually, it really is a very time consuming and error prone way compared to simply importing the bank statement every week or month. It now takes me less than 5 minutes to reconcile an entire month and that is only because I am still creating all the Bank Rules for Suppliers and Clients that I have not transacted with in the last six weeks.
Donāt assume that everyone understands how bank imports, bank rules and automatic reconciliation works. If you have never done it before, it sounds hard and complicated even though it is actually ridiculously easy.
I am really enjoying Reconciling my bank account now. It is a pleasure compared to the pain that it was last year.
I agree importing bank statements is a very efficient data entry method, which probably should be stated in the guide.
I agree having the ability to include a customer/ supplier in each bank rule would be a valuable improvement to Manager (not quite what you said but I think itās the underlying feature we are looking for).
However I would not completely stop doing bank reconciliation. Errors can still occur editing a transaction, using none contiguous import ranges, or mixed manual transactions and imported transaction. All of which should be readily found during reconciliation as other entries should exactly match the external bank records
I call it contact, because that is the name of the field column in receipts and payments. But essentially yes - the supplier and customer name should be input into the bank rule.
yes importing bank statements is a very efficient method.
I fully agree that bank reconciliation is still necessary in the instances you describe, especially as I attach the bank statements on the 31st of every month to the reconciliation entry I make on that date. But what makes bank import so good is that you can see your bank balance before import matches Manager and your balance after import matches your bank account. It is very unlikely unlikely that anything would go wrong during the import unless you edit loads of transactions. Brucanna says he has not done a reconciliation in years - very naughty! But heās right. You donāt really need to.
I think itās worth pointing out that you can in fact use a combination of manual entries and bank statement imports. Iāve been doing it for years. I enter most of my day-to-day receipts and payments manually, which helps me keep on top of what I owe and which customers I need to chase for payment. Then usually about once a month after paying salaries and taxes I import my bank statement, and that brings in all the tax payments, bank charges, etc. Then Iāll do a bank reconciliation to make sure nothing has been missed or duplicated. Manager seems to be very good at identifying transactions that Iāve already entered and not duplicating them when I import the bank statement, so I very seldom have to make any corrections.
Of course, the method that works best for your business will depend on a number of factors, such as number of transactions, payment terms on accounts payable and receivable, ease of exporting and importing bank statements, etc. For me, logging into my internet banking, exporting the account statements, and formatting them for import into Manager is quite a laborious process, which is why I only do it about once a month. And I usually want purchase and sales invoices to be settled within a week or two at most, which is why I like to enter most receipts and payments manually. This is usually up to ten a day at most, so not too arduous.
Why donāt you just import your bank statements weekly or daily if you need to? The impression that I am getting is that you want to get an up to date picture to keep track of your cash flow, what your clients owe and what you owe. You can do this by importing daily/weekly or whenever. Even for the very small amount of transactions that I do monthly, I have already seen a dramatic improvement in efficiency. I spend far less time reconciling now than I used to.
Why is logging itno your bank account so laborious? It takes me 2 minutes to log in, select the dates I want to import and select the otx file format. Then I just open manager and import the otx file. I donāt use csv as it doesnāt work. You donāt need to format the import. It takes me 2 minutes to import the statement. Far quicker than entering all those transactions manually.
Itās an option, and perhaps with a different bank I would. My reason for not doing that is more to do with the specific processes of my particular bank. The login procedure requires several security steps with passwords that are too complex to memorise and an interface that doesnāt work with my password managers, and of the available formats for exporting the statement, the only one that produces a valid file is the .csv option which uses a different date format from Manager, has extra columns, and has columns for credits and debits which need to be merged into a single āAmountā column for Manager. Itās not hard, but it requires more time and effort than entering a few receipts or payments every day. The other stuff ā the taxes, bank charges, etc. ā Iām happy to review every month, so I donāt need to retrieve that information every day or every week.
Iām glad that importing bank statements has made such an improvement to your workflow. It helps me too, but would be even more useful if my bank had a more usable interface.
Also, one of my accounts doesnāt have an internet banking interface, so I need to manually transpose those entries from the monthly PDF statement I receive. Thankfully there are very few transactions in this account.
Not all of my transactions go through the bank. Some are cash payments, and others are done through mobile money, both of which I need to enter manually anyway.
So I think that although importing bank statements can be very useful and save a lot of time and effort for most users, there are cases when it makes sense to do some manual entry, and the optimum ratio could be different for every business.
Interesting. I guess I just assumed that all bank accounts had both file formats to download. Try asking your bank to include the other file format as no formatting is required.
There appear to be a few different formats available to download (.ofx and .qif, plus the .csv that I use, and .pdf which would be even more work to use), but they donāt work when I try to import into Manager, and upon inspection with a text editor I see they donāt seem to actually contain any transaction information, just a few tags and some metadata. Theyāre all 1 KB in size.
Itās a nice idea, but I have zero hope of getting anything more from the bank. Considering my one account doesnāt even have an internet banking interface, and with the chaos and dysfunctionality of the financial system here (Zimbabwe), I donāt think the bank would be the slightest bit interested in a request like this, and I would understand why. Thanks anyway. Itās good to know Manager is ready if things ever improve with my bank!
Donāt know why ofx does not work for you. It works flawlessly here. Strange
The bank may not create the ofx file correctly - especially as it hasnāt any information when he examined it with a text editor
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I import from a variety of banks in different countries and I have never had a problem with .qif.
I agree, but unfortunately the maintainer of the Guides, has repeatedly on this Forum expressed their disapproval of the Bank Statement Import process.
So revolutions still occur - āI am amazed at how quickly all the work is doneā. Now for accrual accounting ?? (just teasing).
@Brucanna Donāt poke the bear hey! Ok fair enough, you were right. It is far more efficient. Now I know.I am actually thinking about asking about accrual as well