Importing bank statements manually

When to import manually

Manual imports are useful when:

• Your bank doesn’t support Open Banking.
• Your bank feed missed a period due to a temporary disconnection.
• You need to import transactions older than 90 days (beyond the live feed’s lookback window).
• You’re migrating historical data from another accounting system.

Supported formats

Format	Notes
CSV	Most widely supported. AccBooks auto-detects column layouts for 500+ bank formats.
OFX / QFX	A structured format supported by most UK banks for direct export.
PDF bank statement	Processed by AccBooks OCR. Less reliable than CSV — use as a fallback.
Excel (XLSX)	Supported if the file has a consistent column structure.

Importing a CSV file

1. Download your bank statement from your bank’s online banking portal. Look for Export transactions or Download statement — choose CSV format.
2. In AccBooks, go to Bank feeds → Import CSV.
3. Select the bank account you’re importing to from the dropdown.
4. Upload the CSV file.
5. AccBooks analyses the file and presents a column-mapping screen. Match each column to the appropriate field:
   • Date — transaction date
   • Description — the bank narrative
   • Amount (or separate Debit / Credit columns)
   • Balance (optional, used for cross-checking)
6. Set the date format if AccBooks hasn’t detected it correctly (DD/MM/YYYY is most common for UK banks).
7. Preview the first 20 transactions to verify the mapping.
8. Click Import.

Duplicate detection

AccBooks compares incoming transactions against existing entries using a combination of date, amount and description. Likely duplicates are shown in a review screen with a similarity score. You can:

• Skip — don’t import this transaction (it’s already in AccBooks).
• Import anyway — force the import even if it looks like a duplicate.
• Merge — link it to an existing transaction (useful for partial matches).

Importing a PDF statement

1. Go to Bank feeds → Import PDF.
2. Upload the PDF.
3. AccBooks OCR extracts the transaction table. This works best with machine-generated PDFs (not scanned images).
4. Review the extracted transactions — OCR can occasionally misread amounts or dates, so check carefully.
5. Confirm the import.

For scanned PDFs, accuracy may be lower. We recommend using CSV wherever possible.

Setting the import date range

By default, AccBooks imports all transactions in the file. To limit the import to a specific date range:

1. Check Limit to date range in the import dialog.
2. Set a From and To date.
3. Transactions outside this range are skipped.

This is useful when you only want to fill a specific gap in your existing data.

After importing

Once imported, transactions appear in the Reconciliation queue alongside live feed transactions. The AI classifies them using the same confidence-scoring model.

Check the import summary (shown after each import) to verify:

• Total transactions imported
• Duplicates skipped
• Any rows that couldn’t be parsed (check the error log for details)