Import Bank and Credit Card Transactions and Reconcile Your Accounts

Bring Bank and Card Transactions Into Big Red Cloud

For AIB, Bank of Ireland, PTSB, and Revolut, Open Banking can bring transactions directly into Big Red Cloud instead of waiting for someone to download and upload statements.

CSV import is available where a direct bank connection is not appropriate, while Power Accounting, our free Excel connector, can also be used to bring credit-card transactions into Big Red Cloud.

However the activity arrives, importing it is only the first step.

Automate the Predictable Transactions

The more Big Red Cloud already knows about a supplier, the less accounting has to be decided again on every invoice.

Supplier details can include VAT information and the purchase, nominal and analysis defaults normally used for that supplier. Purchase Importer can then use those settings when preparing future transactions. So supplier setup is part of the automation.

If the same supplier sends you the same kind of bill every month, there is little value in asking someone to make the same accounting decisions twelve times a year.

Set it up properly once and let Big Red Cloud reuse what you already know.

Make Falling Behind Harder

For many small businesses, the problem with bookkeeping is not one difficult transaction. It is the backlog that builds up.

Supplier invoices sit in email. Receipts stay in pockets or vans. Bank statements wait to be downloaded. Then someone eventually has to reconstruct several weeks of business activity at once.

Big Red Cloud can reduce that build-up.

• Purchase invoices can come into Purchase Importer as they arrive.
• Receipts can be captured from the mobile app.
• Bank transactions can come in automatically through Open Banking.
• Supplier defaults and banking rules can deal with more of the repetitive accounting each time.

That does not remove the need for judgement. It reduces the job from catching up on everything to dealing with a smaller number of exceptions.

Being up to date means more than having imported the bank transactions. The source documents still need to be there, and the accounting treatment still needs to be right.

Why the Accounting Behind the Bank Matters

Imagine a payment provider deposits €970 after collecting €1,000 from customers and deducting €30 of fees.

Categorising the €970 simply as sales may make the bank balance look right, but the accounts have lost the gross sales value and the payment-provider cost.

Or a supplier payment might appear in the bank while the underlying supplier invoice was never entered. The cash movement is visible, but the supplier ledger, creditor balance and potentially the VAT records are incomplete.

Sales records preserve what customers were charged. Purchase Importer captures the supplier documents. Banking records how the money moved.

Those pieces need to describe the same reality.

Reconcile the Books to the Bank

Once the transactions have the right accounting meaning, reconciliation provides the final control.

Bank reconciliation compares what Big Red Cloud says happened with what actually appeared at the bank. Outstanding items can explain legitimate timing differences, while a discrepancy may point to something missing, duplicated, entered for the wrong amount or incorrectly cleared.

The aim is to bring the difference back to zero and understand why.

Reconciliation answers the final question in the workflow:

Do the accounting records agree with what happened at the bank?

You Don’t Have to Do the Books Alone

Big Red Cloud customers can join live banking training with the Customer Success team to learn how to connect accounts, import transactions, create useful rules, manage exceptions and reconcile the books.

The Knowledge Base provides step-by-step guidance afterwards, while RED gives you another way to investigate and work with supported receipts, payments and accounting information when something needs attention.