Bank accounts & imports

Bank imports are how the bank's own record gets into PulseBooks: you upload a statement, its lines are staged, and you clear them on the reconcile screen. Bank imports are included on the Pro and Business plans — see Plans & billing.

Two kinds of bank account

PulseBooks keeps two separate things under Settings, and it helps to know which is which:

• Settings → Bank & Cash Accounts — the accounts your money actually moves through. Each has a name, a type (bank, credit card, cash or other), its own currency, and an opening balance with its date. These are what statements are imported against, what reconciliation checks, and what account balances are computed for. Accounts can be archived when retired; an archived account keeps its history but accepts no new statements.
• Settings → Banking — the bank details printed on your invoices so clients know where to pay: bank name, account holder, account number, branch code, SWIFT/BIC, IBAN and reference instructions.

For importing and reconciling, Bank & Cash Accounts is the one that matters.

Importing a statement

The Banking section in the sidebar has three tabs: Reconcile, Import, and History. On the Import tab, first choose which account the statement belongs to, then upload the file. Four formats are accepted:

• CSV — the wizard shows the file's columns and asks you to map them (date, description, amount, and so on) before previewing.
• OFX — names its own fields, so it goes straight to the preview.
• QIF — names its fields but not its date order, so the wizard asks one question: which date format the bank uses.
• PDF — the statement is read by an AI model, which turns the pages into statement lines (up to 10MB and 25 pages). The extraction is checked against the statement's own opening and closing balances, and anything odd is flagged as a warning. PDF import needs both bank imports and AI extraction, so it appears on Pro and Business plans.

Every format ends at the same preview step: the parsed lines, ready to check before anything is written, with the option to leave rows out. Add lines to Reconcile stages them — evidence of what the bank says, not yet transactions in your books. For an AI-read PDF especially, review the preview before adding the lines.

Duplicate detection

Every staged line carries a fingerprint scoped to its account — built from the bank's own transaction id where the file provides one, and from the line's content where it does not. Re-uploading an overlapping statement, or the same file twice, simply skips the lines that are already staged, and the import summary tells you how many were skipped. Invalid rows (unparseable dates, zero amounts) are counted and skipped rather than failing the whole file.

PulseBooks also checks continuity: each statement's opening balance is compared against the previous statement's closing balance for the same account. A gap or an overlap between two statements is exactly where missed lines hide, so the verdict is shown when you import and kept on the History tab.

Import history

The History tab lists every import: file, account, row counts, who imported it, and its continuity verdict. From each batch you can:

• View the transactions it created.
• Download the original statement file, which is retained with the batch.
• Add lines — append rows to an import that already happened, from a small file, with a preview of exactly what would be added before you commit. This is for the line found sitting in the gap between two statements: appending puts it in the batch where it belongs and recomputes the continuity verdict, instead of leaving a one-line "statement" in your history.
• Undo the import. This permanently deletes the batch, its staged lines, and the transactions created from them, after a confirmation. An undo is refused outright if any of the batch's lines are matched to invoice payments (unmatch them first) or if affected transactions fall in a locked period — see Period close.

Transfers between your own accounts

Money moved between your own accounts — checking to savings, paying off the credit card — is a transfer, not income or an expense, and recording it as one keeps it out of both totals. When a statement line is such a movement, tick Record as a transfer in the reconcile screen's create dialog and post it to a balance-sheet category; the other account's own statement line covers the other side.

A categorisation rule that names a counterpart account will recognise these movements on import and suggest the transfer for you. A connected AI assistant can also record both legs of a transfer in one step — see Connect your AI assistant.

What happens next

Staged lines wait on the Reconcile tab, where you match them to what is already in your books or create transactions from them — the whole workflow is on the Reconciliation page.