Has anyone found a clever way to import bank transactions that are easy to integrate with Grist? Currently i have a couple of projects that i’m doing it manually. For my personal finances its pretty easy to manually import because its coming from one bank and the import is straight forward. For my business finances its much trickier. Im downloading CSV’s from a combination of banks and credit card companies. Some offer csv and some dont. Each format is a bit different so, i have separate tables for each import and then i have a multiplication factor as some show as negative amounts and some are positive. Anyhow im leaning for trying Tiller to get it all into one spreadsheet then csv export. Any other suggestions?
If those companies integrate with Zapier or some other integrator service that also integrates with Grist, you could send data that way. We have a list of integrator services that link with Grist here: Integrator services - Grist Help Center
yea, i guess this was more of a third party solution question. I have gone through and setup my accounts in tiller. next step will be to use Zapier to update the rows to grist. thanks!
Hi @Mr-Rooj I am a fractional CFO and I face this all the time for my clients. Bank feeds lake of protocols and standardization is a chronic issue that no one has quite figured out yet. Rumor has it that HubDoc almost bankrupted themselves on this problem before being sold to Xero.
I’ve found a few ways to get around getting data out of the bank.
1 - Connect to an online General Ledger accounting software (Like QBO - most are free under a certain connection limit). It will bring in data for you and put it in a standard ledger (splitting out the columns). Then most have a way to automate posting down the data to GoogleSheets.
2 - Use a tool like HubDoc. This is basically an accountants marriage of OCR and AI. With this you can either direct connect to your bank, or forward your bank statement (setup an auto forward from your email to HubDoc), it will then extract the info and standardize for you. It’s OCR if done this way, so not perfect, but actually really good.
3 - Setting up a very simple query and append. I’ve historically done this in Microsoft PowerPivot, but you can do it in Grist too. In this you manually download your bank files (which I’ve found isn’t the time consuming part, it’s the data manipulation and join), put them in a file, then run your query against them. I have two tables: 1st, Accounts - include basic entities like account number and open date, but most importantly 1 column or 2?!;
2nd, General Ledger - your transactions referenced by account.
From there it is very simple to read in your data and have it append to your previous months data. Depending on your level of experience you can do this all in one go, or setup a setup a helper table to make it easier. Only trick here is to have meaningful and consistent naming conventions to your raw files, which almost always come naturally that way when you download from the bank. Grist has an amazing GL Template that would get you 90% of the way to where you want to go. (P.s. Grist has an AMAZING CSV import feature, so you don’t even need the query, it will just append the data and from there the table does the rest)
If you ever want to get away from Tiller let me know and I can forward you a Grist or Excel template to get you off the ground!
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Thanks for the info. I have a very easy to manage grist file that i manually import transactions from straight from the bank. I have Tiller setup too but my bank breaks connection too many times. I never got the zapier sync part to work well enough to trust. it takes me 30 seconds to login to my bank save a csv and import to grist. for a few accounts it works great.
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