Hello ACCOUNTS beta testers. We finally have a pre-test version available which includes importing downloads of transactions from your online banking. You can import transactions downloaded from standard bank accounts (generally chequing or savings accounts) and also from credit card accounts.
Importing downloaded online banking transactions can do one or both of two things: match to existing manually-entered transactions (or ones entered as recurring transactions) in ACCOUNTS, or create new transactions in ACCOUNTS based on the imported transactions that didn’t match existing ones. So the two purposes for doing that importing would be for a sort of pre-bank reconciliation (for the manually-entered transactions) or to do some of your data entry of transactions for you, or a combination of the two.
We invite you to try out this feature to see how it works for you, and make sure that our fairly extensive testing hasn’t missed anything that comes up when real users are using it! Because it’s a fairly complex feature, I’d encourage you to start by reading the Help on it (“Importing Online Banking Downloads”) before you try using it.
Also, just in case anything goes wrong, I would recommend that you make a database backup immediately before importing an online banking download, and use Database -> Validation Transactions immediately after you are finished, to make sure nothing went wrong. (If anything shows up in that validation, you can then restore your backup.)
If you encounter any unexpected or technical error messages, please be sure to send us screen shots, and as much description as you can of exactly what you were doing before it happened. (We may also ask you to share a database backup, and copy of the file you were importing, so we can try the same thing, if you are willing.)
You can take a screen-shot of any single message box or window by pressing Alt+PrtSc (or on some laptops, Fn+Alt+PrtSc). Having done that (which doesn’t visibly do anything), you can then paste that directly into an email with Ctrl+V or the Edit -> Paste menu option in your email program, or if that doesn’t work, into a Word or Paint document. Please be sure to use Alt with PrtSc, so it doesn’t take a screenshot of your whole Windows screen, and also please do NOT send camera photos – both of those alternatives are generally huge, and much harder to read.
You can get the beta test version with this new feature from the Pretest page at http://www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/accounts/pretest.htm. What is there will only work if you already have at least release number 2.10, which you can check with Help -> About DONATION. If you have an earlier release, please first upgrade with Tools -> Check for Updates, and then you can take the beta test version from the Pretest page.
Please let us know how your testing goes, and any comments or suggestions you have. You can email us directly, or leave Comments on this blog post.
Thank you so much!