Imports and reconciliation

You’ll need: Transaction imports, Transaction import sources, Reconciliation queue — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Most money arrives somewhere before it arrives in FeePrime — a bank statement, a mobile money log, a gateway settlement. Importing is how you close that gap without keying it twice.

Sources describe how to read a file

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

The mapping says which column in their file is the date, the amount, the reference. The rules describe how to interpret rows. You configure a source once per provider, and every future statement from that provider is read the same way.

That is the point: your bank’s export format is not going to change, so the work of understanding it should happen once rather than every month.

An import is one batch, with expectations

A transaction import names its source, carries the document, and labels the period.

Three fields exist purely as a check on yourself: expected rows, expected debits and expected credits.

Fill them in from the statement before you import. If the import produces different totals, something was misread — a truncated file, a mangled column, a row silently dropped. Without the expectation, an import that swallowed twelve rows looks exactly like a successful one.

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

Reconciliation is the real work

Importing puts external activity in front of you. Reconciliation is matching it to what FeePrime already knows.

Most lines match something: a customer payment you recorded, a supplier bill you paid. Those confirm each other and can be cleared.

The interesting ones are the leftovers:

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

The first is usually a customer payment nobody knew about — which means an invoice is being chased that has already been paid. The second is more serious: a payment recorded that did not happen, or happened from a different account.

Both are found the same way and neither is found by looking at balances alone.

Do it often

Reconciliation done monthly means investigating a discrepancy from five weeks ago, when nobody remembers the day. Done weekly, the answer is usually in someone’s recent memory.

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

Try it