Bank Manager tips and tricks

The Pastel Bank Manager add-on module gives you the ability to work with bank statements that you download via the Internet.

Manually capturing your company’s bank statement into your accounting system is quite frankly boring and fraught with possible errors. Pastel Bank Manager was designed to automate this task and save time and improve accuracy. Here are some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Bank Manager.

At the click of a button, the add-on module imports bank statements downloaded via your online banking service. And once imported, all you need to do is assign customer, supplier or ledger accounts to the transactions. You can even program Bank Manager to recognise your allocations, so for future imports, the system will automatically assign transactions to the correct ledger account for you. Nice.

Copying account codes, tax types and descriptions to multiple lines

The first editing facility we look at is to copy fields to other lines. For example, you can enter an account in the account field, and then copy that account to all lines beneath that line. Note that the system copies both the account code and the tax type. You must therefore set both these before you copy. You can also copy descriptions.

To copy a field to other lines:
• Enter the account code and the tax type you require.
• Right click on the value you wish to copy and select the Copy Down option.
• A message displays. If you choose Yes, the system overwrites existing values. If you choose No, the system only copies to lines that have blank accounts.
• The system copies the fields into the other lines below the current line.

Assigning recurring coding

In a typical business approximately 95% of transactions recur frommonth to month. Examples are debit order payments, internet supplier payments, customer receipts, etc. This feature relies on key words you can identify in the description field.

For example, you pay a supplier by internet transfer on a monthly basis. The description you assigned to appear on your bank statement reads “Internet Payment ABC Steels”. You highlight “ABC Steels” as your transaction identifier and link it to that supplier account. Refer to screenshot A below.

Do not select “Internet payment”, because all other lines that contain “Internet Payment” in their descriptions will then link to the same supplier account.

To ensure that you do not choose phrases that are too specific or too common, the system does not allow you to select less than four characters or the entire description.

Therefore, to be as accurate as possible, select phrases that are unique enough to link to a specific account but not specific enough to never occur again. For example, selecting the phrase “bank charges (123)” is not good practice because “(123)” will change in the following month, and the system will not allocate the transaction automatically. Instead, select “bank charges”.

Once you set this up, the system will automatically do the same thing when you load the next bank statement.

To assign accounts, tax types, and descriptions to phrases:
• In the line that contains the phrase, select the Account and the Tax type fields.
• In the Description column, select the phrase you wish to use, right click and select the Add to Recurring Coding option.
• If the description also appears in the other (payments or receipts) tab, you have the option to continue or not.
• This will be the default phrase for the transaction description, however you are able to change it.
• On clicking OK, the system replaces the account, tax type, and description in each line that contains the phrase: Note each line above that now has an account of 9200000, and a description “ABC STEELS”. Refer to screenshot B below.
• Click on the Account Coding tab: The system remembers this setting for future imports. You can edit all the fields except the initial phrase. You can of course add many phrases into the system. Refer to screenshot C below.

Splitting lines into multiple accounts

You may also need to allocate a single transaction to more than one account. For example, you may want to split a rent payment between different departments.

The Bank Manager utility helps you to do this as well as save the split information. Using rent as an example, you would want to split each month’s rent in the same manner.

To split payments:
• Right click on the line you wish to split, and select Split Transaction.
• You can enter multiple lines, each with their own details. The line must total the original transaction amount.
• Once the split lines have the same value as the original line, click the OK button. The system will return you to the transactions, delete the original line, and adds the split lines to the end of the table.

Contact us:

Tel: 0860 PASTEL/ 011 304 3300
E-mail: support@pastel.co.za
Website: www.pastel.co.za