Imports and reconciliation

Before you start, open these. They are all under Cash in the menu: Transaction imports, Transaction import sources and Reconciliation.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

Most money arrives somewhere before it arrives in FeePrime. A bank statement. A mobile money log. A settlement from a payment provider.

Importing is how you close that gap without typing everything twice.

A source describes how to read a file

A transaction import source has a name, a mapping, some rules, and notes.

The mapping says which column in their file is the date, which is the amount, which is the reference. The rules say how to read the rows.

You set a source up once per provider. Every statement from that provider after that is read the same way.

That is the whole point. Your bank’s file format is not going to change, so the work of understanding it should happen once, not every month.

An import is one batch, with a check on it

A transaction import names its source, holds the file, and says which period it covers.

Three boxes exist purely to check you: expected rows, expected debits and expected credits.

Fill them in from the statement before you import.

If the import comes out with different totals, something was misread. A file that got cut off. A column that got mangled. A row quietly dropped.

Without that expectation, an import that swallowed twelve rows looks exactly like one that worked.

That is the difference between importing and importing safely, and it costs you thirty seconds.

Matching up is the real work

Importing puts the outside world in front of you. Matching is lining it up against what FeePrime already knows.

Most lines will match something. A customer payment you recorded. A supplier bill you paid. Those two confirm each other and you can clear them.

The interesting ones are what is left over:

   in the bank, not in FeePrime   money you never recorded
   in FeePrime, not in the bank   money you recorded that never moved

The first is usually a customer payment nobody knew about. Which means somebody is chasing an invoice that has already been paid.

The second is more serious. Either a payment was recorded that never happened, or it went out of a different account.

You find both the same way, and you find neither by looking at balances.

Do it often

Do this monthly and you are investigating something odd from five weeks ago, when nobody remembers that day.

Do it weekly and the answer is usually still in somebody’s head.

The work is about the same either way. The difficulty is not.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, set up a source with a mapping. Import a small file, but put the wrong expected totals in on purpose. Watch the check catch you.