Explain your bank transactions easier and faster than ever, with these new features:
New bank accounts page - clearer bank accounts list with statements grouped by account
Statement overview - assess statement progress before getting stuck in
Undo - made a mistake? Undo any or all explanations with one click!
Attachments - upload photos or PDFs of your bills or receipts directly in bank explain!
Unallocated payments - explain payments on account and overpayments
Invoice and bill matching - smarter suggestions mean fewer clicks
AI-powered account code suggestion - faster bank explain means less time doing your bookkeeping
Reconciliation of all transaction types - including part-payments, and bank transfers!
Focused bank explain form - a simplified view makes it easy to see what matters
Import rule improvements - bulk explain is easier now
New bank accounts page
Your bank accounts are listed with the name, account number, bank feed connection status, account balance and new transactions total shown for each account.
Select the ‘New transactions’ total link to start explaining transactions for that bank account.
Expand a bank account to see the details of bank feed or imported statements that need explaining. You will also see the last Clear Books transaction date and links to all the actions you might need for that account such as; Import statement, Money in, Money out and Edit.
Use the ‘All bank statements’ button to view all bank feed or imported bank statements in a single table.
Initially you will see all statements listed but you can use the filter to list only statements that have unexplained transactions, or only those that have been fully explained.
Note: You can also get to all statements from the navigation menu: Money | Bank statements | All bank statements.
Statement overview
When you navigate to a statement, you can now see an overview of the statement without any particular transaction being selected, to give you a chance to assess the progress made, current status of transactions and also choose which transaction to explain first.
Just click anywhere on a transaction row to explain that transaction.
Note: After a transaction is explained, the next unexplained transaction will be automatically selected. Click on the current transaction row to deselect it and return to the list of transactions.
Undo
Undo a single transaction
You can now undo any explained bank transaction. As you would expect, this simply reverses the actions performed by the explanation and allows you to redo it. This will remove any new Clear Books entries that were created, deallocate any invoices and bills that were selected as paid and unreconcile an existing Clear Books transaction that the bank transaction was matched with.
Float over the undo icon against any paid transaction to see what actions will be reversed with links to the Clear Books transactions in question.
Clear Books will then select that transaction ready for the new explanation to take place.
Undo all
There is also an Undo all button that will revert the entire bank statement to its original state with all transactions unexplained.
Attachments
Attach files to new payments or receipts, directly from the bank explain! This much-requested feature is a gamechanger!
The attached files are stored against the new business expenditure (PAY) or income (REC) transaction that is created.
Unallocated payments
Unallocated payments is great when:
Your customers are paying you a deposit before you invoice them
Your customers overpaid you for an invoice, and you are going to hold onto that money for now.
You paid your supplier a deposit before they invoiced you
You overpaid a supplier and they have your money for the meantime - it might be refunded to you, or it might be used for a future bill from them
You can’t find all the invoices or bills that the payment is for - you can save the payment against your customer or supplier to update their balance and allocate it later.
For payments on account, or overpayments, you can now record a bank transaction as an unallocated receipt/payment against the selected customer or supplier. The transaction will reduce the outstanding amount for that contact, but will remain available for allocation to invoices or bills at a later stage.
You can also allocate part of the amount and save the bank transaction as ‘partially allocated’ with a single click, leaving any remaining balance as unallocated.
Invoice and bill matching
The new UI shows exact unpaid invoice/bill matches, so you can identify allocations quicker. But if none of these are the one, click the arrow to expand and see the five nearest matches.
AI-powered account code suggestions
The new bank explain feeds the bank payment descriptions into the Clear Books AI accounting categorisation engine, and suggests the most likely account code for you, to speed up explaining your purchases.
Not the right account code? The account code selector suggests up to four more account codes it’s likely to be - or choose from any of your account codes.
Reconciliation of all transaction types
You can now reconcile your bank feed transactions with any of your pre-existing bank transactions in Clear Books. Whether they are bank transfers, part payments, payments allocated to multiple bills/invoices, they are now all available to be reconciled with your imported bank transactions.
(If you’ve ever been explaining a transfer and needed to “delete” the other side, this means you no longer need to!)
Focused bank explain form
We show you the most likely way you want to explain each bank transaction, with the others just a click away.
Based on the bank transaction, import rules, selected contact, existing Clear Books transactions and unpaid invoices and bills, the user interface will focus on the likely action required for each transaction, with all the same alternative actions available as before.
Import rule improvements
Save all matches
You’ll only see the bulk explain button if there are multiple transactions that match the import rule. When the button shows, it says how many transactions will be explained.
Customise new import rules
If you want to edit your import rules before they are created, just switch on the 'Customise import rule creation' option.
When a bank transaction doesn't match with an existing import rule, Clear Books will make a new one. Before you save that transaction, you will see an option to customise the new rule. Click on the pencil icon to edit the new rule.
New view for import rules
The import rule pop-up shows the current transaction description and will ensure that any modified search criteria still matches with it, so you can future-proof your import rules with ease.
The action section has a more familiar layout, and when customising or manually creating a new import rule, it will be pre-populated with the current transaction entries too.
Use rules immediately
Once you have customised a rule, Clear Books finds all matches in the current statement so you get the maximum automation straight away.
