Splasm Software Discussions

I DLed a CSV file from the bank. I had to shift the columns around, but that was no biggie. But after I imported it, all of the transactions were in green, i.e., credits. How can I get it to recognize debits, and show them in red?

Thanks for a great program!!

That’ll happen when the bank uses positive amounts for all transactions listed in the CSV, which is a rare formatting decision—luckily, it's something that's fairly easy to work-around. Do you see a column in the file that’s used to denote the Kind of each transaction, like one that says “Debit” within the column for each debited item? That can be used to tell CheckBook (Pro) which amounts should be treated as negative, if so.

What you’ll need to do, at this point, is remove all that was imported before, go through the import again, this time, adding a checkmark to the box toward the bottom of the Import Options window, next to where it says “Import Entries whose X field is X as Debits”—the Xs here represent different places where you'll make some selections, the first one needing to match the field name at the top of the column in question, with the second needing to match whatever's used to flag certain transactions as Debits. For example, you may actually see “Import Entries whose Kind field is Debit as Debits”, in the end, but what works varies depending on the bank.

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Allan Woodall
Phosphorescent Phage
Splasm Software
http://www.splasm.com

Thanks for that, Keith. Everything was fine, until I got to the last step. I was able to assign Import Entries whose "description" field is "X" but I had a list of past purchases. I had assumed that it should read "description" as "debits" but that wasn't so.

Where did I go wrong?

The Description field wouldn't typically be used to store Kind data, so that's to be expected. Do you see some other column in the preview up above, that contains the word "Debit", "charge", or something along those lines in it, for numerous items? When banks use all positive amounts, they tend to favor some other way of flagging transactions as Deposits versus Debits, and the app has to look at that to determine what's what. Or, in the event that there are two separate columns for the different Amounts, you may just need to select "Negative Amount" up above the one with the debited amount values.

Should you continue to struggle, feel free to send your file over to us at support@splasm.com, then we'll be able to tell you exactly how to get it imported successfully. Thanks!

_________________
Allan Woodall
Phosphorescent Phage
Splasm Software
http://www.splasm.com