Import a bank statement and reconcile your cashbook

Choose a statement for the period you want to review. The PDF you download from your banking app works as-is — SimpleTaxFlow reads its table and checks every row against the balance your bank printed. CSV, .xls and .xlsx exports work too, and common columns such as Date, Description, Reference, Amount, Money in and Money out are recognised automatically. Download the PDF rather than photographing a paper copy: a scan has no text to read.

Go to Activity, choose Import statement, and select the file. If the PDF is password-protected, you will be asked for the password — it is used once to open the file and never stored. If you have more than one business, pick which business the statement belongs to — matching and any new transactions are scoped to that business, and the import is labelled with its name.

The preview shows the dates, descriptions, references, and amounts SimpleTaxFlow found. For a PDF, it also tells you whether every row adds up to the closing balance your bank printed — when it does, the figures have been checked by the statement’s own arithmetic, not just read off the page; any row that disagrees is highlighted so you can check it. For a CSV or Excel file you also see which column was matched to each field, and can remap them if your bank uses unusual headers. Fix the file itself only when a row has an invalid date, missing description, or zero amount.

Rows with the same date, amount, and matching reference or description are linked to existing transactions instead of duplicated. This is how a receipt captured earlier through WhatsApp or the web can be reconciled to the later bank statement line.

Statement rows that do not match an existing record are added to Activity as uncategorised transactions. Review the category, business purpose, and supporting evidence before relying on the totals for MTD.