Description
SoftLedger connects with Plaid to allow linking bank accounts and subsequently fetching bank transactions for user action directly within SoftLedger. If operating with a bank that is not connected via Plaid, this feature allows users to extract bank transactions from their banks through Excel, and upload those raw bank transactions to create bank transactions for use within SoftLedger.
See the steps below in this article to add custom bank accounts and upload bank statement transactions to your SoftLedger bank transactions.
Create a custom bank account
The first step would be to add a custom bank account from Cash Management ➝ Link Banks page and clicking +New:
Clicking the Click here button from the footer area will open the "Custom" bank account creation form:
All of the inputs here are required:
Provider
Name
Number
Type
Possible types are Investment, Credit, Depository, Loan, Brokerage, and Other
Link a ledger account to the custom bank account
Once the bank account has been added, the banks table will include this bank, denoting it as a custom bank under the Acc Type column.
If not immediately prompted to link the bank account to a ledger account, click into the three stacked dots to open the bank account actions, and click the first icon to link the SoftLedger Ledger Account. This is required before moving on to upload bank transactions or review those transactions in the bank transactions section.
Upload transactions for the custom bank
There's a new Bank Transactions Upload menu item under Cash Management that will open the page where the user can upload transactions.
To start, click the "Upload" button and choose the downloaded bank transaction file to be uploaded:
Note: In order to select the custom bank account and add transactions, the bank account would have been added and had a linked Ledger Account connected in previous steps.
File restriction details:
XLSX or CSV file types
less than 5 MB
must have header row as the first row
Below are a couple sample bank export files that could come from a bank to be used to upload into the custom bank account set up in SoftLedger:
Map file column headers to bank transaction fields
To allow users to simply upload their bank statement file without having to copy paste them in our CSV format, users can map column headers from the file to the bank transaction fields.
The fields required for upload will be denoted and listed on the left of the popup modal, where users can then select the relevant column headers from the file for each field on the right.
Note: SoftLedger will attempt to map fields with exact same header names to bank transaction fields, but those mappings can still be altered by the user.
Headers to be mapped
Required:
Date
value from file must be a valid date and NOT in future
maps to Journal.postedDate when reconciling
Description
value from file must not be empty
maps to Journal line description when reconciling
Amount
value from file must be a valid number
strings such as "USD 100.01" are not supported, value must be a number without any prefix/suffix/commas.
value must not be zero or empty
positive values will map to the credit lines of the journal entry created from the bank transaction
negative values will map to the debit lines of the journal entry created from the bank transaction
Currency
value from file must be a valid currency supported by SoftLedger
custom currencies are not supported
maps to Journal.currency when reconciling
Optional:
Authorized Date
if a header mapping is provided, value from file must be a valid date and NOT in future
maps to Journal.transactionDate when reconciling
Category
maps to Journal.reference when reconciling
Note: The Amount field will add the corresponding bank amount to the DEBIT and CREDIT columns based on logic: Amount>0, CREDIT linked ledger accountAmount<0, DEBIT linked ledger account
Viewing and creating journal entries from bank transactions
The uploaded transactions can be viewed from the Cash Management ➝ Bank Transactions, where users can select the custom bank account, and review the bank transaction lines. See the Bank Transactions article for more details on how to operate with bank transactions of the custom bank account.
