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 available 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 ➝ Bank Accounts page and clicking +New:
Clicking the Click here button from the footer area will open the "Custom" bank account creation form:
See the inputs to create a Custom Bank:
Provider
Name
Number
Type
Possible types are
Bank AccountorCredit Card(see more below)
Location
This is used as the default location for the journal lines created from this bank account's transactions.
This Location is also used for matching existing journal lines to link to the bank transactions.
If no location is set, the location context picker will be used for both of the cases above.
The Type of a custom bank account is used to determine the direction of the journal lines created from the bank transactions.
Credit Card: Positive
Amountin file will become a journal entrycreditagainst the linked ledger account and negative in file will become a journal entrydebit.Bank Account: Positive
Amountin file will become a journal entrydebitagainst the linked ledger account and negative in file will become a journal entrycredit.
Link the ledger account and select available dimensions
Once the bank account has been added, select the softledger ledger account to link to this custom bank account, as well as choose which dimensions (e.g. Customer, Vendor, Cost Center) that are available for classifications of bank transactions.
Note: The Bank LLM feature must be enabled in your tenant to prompt dimensions for classification selection.
If not immediately prompted to link the bank account to a ledger account, you can still link the ledger account from the three stacked dots next to Bank Accounts in the table, or clicking the Bank Account number to open the Bank Account Detail page for editing.
Editing from Bank Accounts Table:
Editing from clicking into Bank Detail from Bank Number:
Dimension Classification
Ledger Account, Vendor and Customer are enabled by default for every bank account.
User can disable them or add more dimensions to this list from the Bank Detail page or from the Configure Dimension Classification menu item on the Bank Account table.
When transactions for a bank are uploaded, the upload process checks what dimensions are enabled to be classified on the transactions. Those dimensions will be classified by the Bank LLM (when enabled) on the transactions in the background. See more detail on the Bank Rules and Suggestions article -->
Upload transactions for the custom bank
There's a 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, along with the Bank Account this will be uploaded to. Then follow the header mapping process:
Details for the inputs from the Excel Upload:
Select file to upload
Select Bank Account to upload transactions for
Header Mapping section
In this section you connect the column headers from the excel file to the required headers needed (e.g. Date, Amount) of the bank transactions.
Selector for each column header in the file
Returns column header names from first row of file (be sure headers are in first row of file)
Automatically maps columns to the expected fields by matching the header name to the selected excel column header name (e.g. Date to Date).
The user can edit the automated matches as well as pick the remaining matches
Common considerations:
Be sure the excel file has table headers in the first row of the file.
Be certain that the file has a Currency column where the currency for the journal entries can be picked up (this sometimes needs to be added by the user)
Confirm that the Bank Account has been set up with the Bank Type of Bank Account or Credit Card as appropriate, as this determines linked ledger account as debit or credit based on amount as postitive or negative. See prior section
File restriction details:
XLSX or CSV file types
Note: XLSX files perform better for recognizing Date formats
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:
More detail on Headers needed for Bank Transactions
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
Viewing and creating journal entries from bank transactions
The uploaded transactions can be viewed from the Cash Management ➝ Bank Transactions or Bank Accounts, 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.
