 0. Accounting software 2023. Import bank transactions into zero. Get ready to become an accountant hero with zero 2023. First, a word from our sponsor. Well, actually, these are just items that we picked from the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program, but that's actually good for you. Because these aren't things that were just given to us from some large corporation which we don't even use in exchange for us selling them to you. These are things that we actually researched, purchased, and used ourselves. Focusrite Scarlett Solo 3rd Gen USB interface with software suite. I've been using a Focusrite for years for my audio needs before which time I had a USB microphone which plugged directly into the computer. But I think you'll find, as I have found, if you want to increase the quality of your microphone, you will need an interface and the Focusrite is the go-to interface as far as I'm concerned. I've been using this for years now. It works well. It's easy to use. It seems quite durably built because I only do the screen recordings. I only need the one Solo interface. However, if you have multiple microphones you need to plug in or if you have other instruments you need to plug in, you can look at a similar model that has more input ports. If you would like a commercial-free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com Where we have many different courses you can purchase one at a time or have a subscription model giving you access to all the courses. Courses which are well-organized have other resources like Excel files and PDF files to download and no commercials. Here we are in our Custom Zero homepage. Going into the company file, we set up in a prior presentation the bank feed file. In prior presentations, we set up a checking account which we can see in the accounting drop-down either in the bank accounts or in the chart of accounts. Let's first look at the chart of accounts down below noting that when you first set up a zero account, there will not typically be a checking account because zero really generally wants you to connect to the bank as you add the checking account. So you can add the checking accounts either here by selecting the checking account up top or we can go to the accounting drop-down and the bank accounts where we have the special bank account area and we can add the bank account here. Now remember when you add the bank account then it's typically going to ask you for an institution as though you're going to connect to the bank feeds. If you don't want to connect to the bank feeds as we do not, we set up the bank account and then in the next section we said skip the connection to the bank feeds because we want to be uploading the transactions from the bank at this point in time instead of getting them directly from the bank feeds. I'm going to go back to the accounting drop-down and the banking then so now we have our checking account here and we're going to be uploading the information into the system at this point in time. If you don't have anything in there yet you can just go to the manual import or we can go to the drop-down here and we say import as statement noting that when it says a statement you probably are going to think of a PDF form. We're not using a PDF form. We're entering the transactions. The format types provided to us are they would prefer the OFX and then they've got the QFX, the QIF, the QBO and the CSV. Now the ones that are most likely in my experience available to you, you could have in your bank account all these available to you but just remember you're not looking for a PDF file of your bank statement. You're looking for the transactions in these formats. The QBO is probably quite common these days type of file and if they don't have that then the CSV. I think the QBO is usually a little bit easier possibly to upload into zero with having less kind of glitches than the CSV file which could have a few different kind of layouts that might be provided from the bank but the CSV file is also the one that's going to be kind of most common. So if your bank for whatever reason doesn't have any of these file types it's likely that they'll have a CSV file type which is just a comma deliminated file type which you can open with Excel. If you want to look at a template you can see what the template looks like over here. We checked that out in a prior presentation. We have now imagined that we downloaded this information from our bank, from our financial institution. Here it is in a QBO type of file. Here it is in the CSV type of file. Now I think the QBO file is more likely to have less difficulty to directly upload now into the zero system. Remembering that this looks like it's like a QuickBooks desktop icon like you're going to open up the QuickBooks desktop software but this is really a QBO data file which is just the bank data file. So if I right click on this once again and just look at the properties to it you can see it's a QuickBooks OFXdata.QBO type of file. So I'm going to use that one here. So I'm going to go into zero again and we're going to upload it. So down below we've got the file to upload. I'm going to select the file or we can drag and drop the file. I'll go ahead and select it, go into my desktop where I've got just a bunch of stuff and I want to go into that checking account. So here it is I'm just going to pick up the checking and so it pulls that in so I can see attached down here the QBO file so I'm going to say great. Let's say next now and now it's showing me some of the data so it's kind of given me an example of the data. You can see here review and complete import summary of transactions. It's pulling in 91 transactions so we can kind of double check if that seems appropriate from the information from the bank. Zero will check for duplicates when you complete the import. That's often one of the problems when you start pulling data in from the bank account is to see if you have duplicate information so zero is getting better and better at basically detecting whether or not you have duplicate information so that you don't have pulling in data twice. Obviously you can check them off or you can uncheck them off. They're checked off by default. It looks like everything is pulling in correctly so I'm going to complete the import completing the import. So so there we have it. So now this information has been pulled in. So just to reorientate ourselves I'm going to close this top bit up here. If I if I now go to the accounting drop down and go into my bank accounts. Now I can see that I have the statement balance is showing here in my checking account. And then if I go into the drop down I usually just go into the account transactions and that will pull us into this area where we have these three tabs. The reconcile the bank statement in the account transactions. Now remember nothing's in the account transactions because I haven't actually entered any accounts on our side. We haven't entered any data on our side because we're imagining that we're going to basically create our books for the most part from the bank feeds. So we're going to make our accounts from the bank feeds on the bank statement side of things. Here's the transactions that got pulled in from the bank statement. And you can see over here they've been unreconciled meaning they haven't been reconciled to anything that we have put in on our side as kind of like a bank reconciliation component in here. Now of course they're not reconciled for us because for the most part we're going to be creating our books from this information. And so then on this side you've got the reconcile tab which is basically now saying if there was any matches I'm going to match up what's on the bank to what's in your books. Now if there was a match you would have some green items over here that zero is saying hey look I've seen these two kind of line up to each other. We don't have any matches because again we haven't entered anything on our side of the system. We're going to build our side of the system primarily from the information from the bank. So what we're going to do is go through this information and we're basically going to add it as we go. Now note by default I only have the three tabs up top. And I believe that's because a zero is basically saying hey look I think this is the easiest way for most people to kind of match things up. But we could add another tab possibly for the cash coding which kind of gives a more of a summary look of things. So if you want to add that tab then you actually go to the user settings and then you can add the tab there. So we can go to the dropdown up top. We can go into the settings and then I'm going to go into the users and then within the user settings. And remember zero is quite nice with the settings over here in terms of how many users you can have. I don't think they have a limit on the users which is pretty good. So I can go into a particular user and then down here in the bank account and balances by default it has a reconcile and edit statement lines non cash coding. And then it's got bulk reconciliation and statement line editing cash coding. So the bulk could be a little bit faster sometimes but possibly a little bit takes a little bit more of a learning curve to look at. So let's just take a look at that update permissions and then if I go back into the accounting dropdown and we go into the bank information. I can then say let's go back into the dropdown here to like look at my account transactions where I typically go. And then now you've got this added tab here of the cash coding. And so this allows you to kind of sort so that when you have like multiple transactions that have the same payee for example it's quite common then to sort by the payee. So that then when you're assigning out the accounts and whatnot you can see them all side by side. And so when you're doing bulk data input if you're doing data input for an entire year's worth of information this is often a useful tool. And that's often the case when you're when you're first like connecting the bank feeds after that point in time. Then I think the thought process is that this method is actually easier oftentimes because it gives you a little bit more information on the transactions as they come in. And for most small and mid-sized businesses if you're doing this like real time on a day to day basis then it's then it's oftentimes going to be fairly easy to kind of match things up or record transactions as they come in. It's going to be usually you would think when you have bulk transactions you're entering a whole years worth of transactions or something like that. You're a bookkeeper and you've been asked to put together a bunch of financial transactions for the year to help with taxes. If you're in the United States for example or over your first starting your accounting system and you're in the middle of the year and you want to pull in all the data for six months to start off with. And that's when you would think the cash coding could be easier due to the fact that you can sort your information by the payee and then try to put in the like transactions at the same time and put the account line items in line by line here. It could be nice and easy. OK, so that's going to be the general process. Note that nothing has been added to the actual financial statements yet. So although I have all this information in here if I go to the accounting drop down. I'm sorry if I let's go to this tab to the right access close that tab. Let's right click and duplicate this just to show that if I go to the accounting drop down and open up my balance sheet then I don't have anything in it yet right because even though I have all this data in the system. We haven't given it enough information to actually start populating our financial statements. What does it need to help populate the financial statements. It needs to know which accounts to be assigned to from our chart of accounts. And we can also give it and probably should be given it of course who the transaction is involved with the contacts meaning the customers are the vendors which will start doing next time. And as we do that we could set up rules so that in the future it will know pretty much automatically you know what the transaction will be and it'll be much easier going forward.