The Banking page is where your real bank activity meets your books. Lines arrive, you (or your rules) say what each one is, and only then do they become bookkeeping.
Two ways in, one river
- A connection brings activity in on its own. You link your bank once on the Connections page; after that, a pull refreshes every account the connection covers. Banks publish new activity roughly daily.
- A statement upload covers everything else. Download a statement (PDF or CSV) from your bank's website and drop it in. The reader works out the bank's format by itself, shows you what it found, and tells you if a page looks off, before anything is saved.
Both paths land in the same place, and kBooks removes duplicates, so a statement overlapping a feed does not double anything.
The four tabs
- Review is the inbox: lines waiting for your answer.
- In the books holds every line whose money reached the books, of two kinds. Categorized lines are the ones you added, and Add created the entry. Matched lines are the ones kBooks paired with something that already existed (an invoice payment, a bill payment, a transfer between your own accounts); confirming a match creates nothing new, it just marks the existing entry as cleared by the bank. The selector beside the tabs shows one kind or both.
- Excluded are lines you have set aside on purpose (a duplicate, a personal charge) with a note of why. They never reach the books.
Categorizing
For each line, pick the category (and class and payee if you use them) and add it. When kBooks recognizes the line it proposes the answer for you, with a reason you can see. Anything that repeats deserves a rule: "anything containing CITY WATER goes to Utilities, payee City Water Co." Rules run on every future pull, and a rule can post automatically once you trust it.
Fill in from your history
Rules answer the lines you wrote rules for. For everything else, the violet sparkles button on the For review toolbar reads how you categorized the same merchants before - both from bank lines you have already added and from entries you typed by hand - and fills in the account, the class and the payee where your own past decisions agree. It only ever touches lines that are completely empty: a rule's proposal and anything you picked yourself are left exactly as they are, and nothing is posted until you press Add.
Rows it filled turn violet and carry a chip. Hover the chip and it tells you exactly what it matched - the merchant, how many times you have seen it, the span of dates, and whether the amount is one you always pay. Click the chip and a window lists the actual past entries it learned from, so you can judge the evidence yourself. If your books class their money and your history could not settle the class (the same vendor paid for different properties, say), the chip turns amber and says Needs a class - the row is deliberately not finished until you pick one.
Change your mind in one click: the undo arrow beside the sparkles takes back everything the fill wrote, and only that - your own picks stay.
Merchants kBooks already knows
Your own history cannot help on a merchant you have never categorized, and in your first week that is every merchant. So where the history has nothing to say, kBooks falls back on a shared list of the merchants any small business meets - the fuel brands, the card processors, the phone companies, the office suppliers - and where businesses in general book them.
Those rows turn indigo rather than violet, and the chip says plainly that the answer came from a general list and not from anything you taught. The list never picks a class or a payee, because it cannot know yours. Your own history always wins: the shared list only ever answers where the fill stayed silent, it is refused by Accept all exactly as a learned guess is, and the same undo arrow takes it back.
It says nothing at all when it does not recognise the merchant, or when your chart names the account something it does not recognise. A missing suggestion costs you one pick; a wrong one costs you finding it later.
You choose what it reads. Clicking the sparkles opens a window before anything happens. It says how many lines have nothing assigned yet - the only rows the fill may touch - and offers three choices:
- My books, then general - the default, and what is described above.
- My books only - the shared list is never consulted. Use it when you would rather have a gap than a general answer.
- General list only - your own past decisions are ignored on that run. Useful when the history in your books came from somewhere else and you do not trust it yet.
Pick one and press Fill in - the button names the number of lines it will look at, and it stays off when every line already carries something. The choice is remembered for you, not for the computer you are sitting at, so it follows you from the office to home.
Employee cards on one account
A business credit card often carries extra cards for staff, and the bank reports each card's spending under its own number - so mapping just the main card quietly misses everything the staff spent. In Settings, under Connections, every mapped account offers + Employee cards: tick the staff cards that belong to the same card account and their transactions join that one account's feed. One card in kBooks, exactly like the bank's combined statement - nothing new appears on the Banking page.
On a bank account the same control reads + Sub-accounts and speaks of sub-accounts instead - the mechanics are identical.
Every merged line wears a small chip naming where it arrived, so "who spent this" is answered at a glance in For review. Cards sharing a balance are grouped together, and one matching the main card carries a Same balance hint - banks usually report the account's balance on every one of its cards - but nothing is ever attached for you: you tick, you save. The columns sort, and your sort follows you to any machine.
Prefer to track an employee card as its own account in kBooks? Do not attach it - map it on its own row instead, exactly as before. A card attached to one account is never offered anywhere else, the same one-place rule every mapping follows.
Rules your books are asking for
Beside the Rules button sits a violet lightbulb. It reads the last twelve months of your own decisions and proposes the rules those decisions are asking for - a merchant you have categorized the same way three, seven, fifteen times is a rule you have already written by hand, over and over.
Each proposal says what a rule would look for, where it would put the money, how sure it is, and how many past lines it would have caught. Open the arrow on the right and it lists the actual transactions behind it, because nobody should accept a rule they cannot check. Where the dates form a pattern, it says so: "Every quarter, around the 20th".
It never proposes something you already have. Every pattern is replayed against your live rules first, and the ones already covered are counted in the green chip rather than offered again. A short list with a big green number is the compliment it looks like.
A proposal whose class your history could not settle is held back in amber until you pick one, for the same reason the fill does it: on books that class their money, a rule that fills only the account makes a line look finished when it is not. Pick the class in the row and the proposal is ready.
Tick what you want, press Create, and the rules are yours - they behave exactly like ones you typed, they suggest rather than post, and they take effect the next time you press Apply rules.
If a month looks wrong
Nothing that came from the bank is ever lost. A line can be un-excluded, a category can be changed later (the report drill is often the fastest way to spot and fix one), and the reconcile is the monthly proof that your books and the bank agree.
The Undeposited Funds card
When money is sitting in Undeposited Funds - payments received but not yet taken to the bank - Banking shows a card for the drawer: the balance, how many payments are waiting, and the oldest one's date. Record deposit right on the card groups them into the one deposit line your statement will show. When the drawer is empty the card steps aside; the account itself always remains visible on the Chart of Accounts and the Balance Sheet.
A receipt that matches a bank line
When a receipt in Documents looks like a charge waiting in Review, the charge's row says so: a Receipt? chip names the receipt, states the evidence in plain words (same amount, one day apart, the name matches), and lets you open the receipt to check. Use it links the receipt to that bank line; Not it puts the suggestion away for this visit.
A linked receipt shows as Receipt linked on the row, and the link is kept with the line itself: it is still there after a reload, on another computer, and for anyone else who works these books. A bank line is not yet an entry, so the receipt attaches to the entry the moment the line becomes one, however that happens: Add, a split Add, a rule posting it, Match to an existing entry. From then on the receipt sits on the entry the way any attachment does, and no other bank line is offered it. Unlink puts the receipt back among the suggestions.
Suggestions come from receipts that carry an amount and a date. A photo the reader could not date is not suggested; give it a date in Documents and it joins the next time the list refreshes.