CREATING A CONFIGURATION - Example 2
Where possible, download your statement in OFX (Money, Active Statement) format from your bank. With this format you should not need to create a Configuration (template).
If not available, use CSV or Excel format.
In this example we use CSV format.
Creating a Configuration from your file
View your CSV file in ‘Source File & Results’. Your statement should look something like this, except in this example we have clearly spaced the columns.
This statement contains seven columns: one of which is empty and appears as: ,, or an empty space between two commas.
The other columns include one for date, one for the transaction value, one for a transaction number, one for a category, one for description, and one for the balance amount. Each of these columns is delimited by a comma.
Let’s see how we’d enter this statement into the Configuration Editor:
In this statement all of the columns are delimited (or separated) by a comma.
Date: The date appears in the first column in the format day-month-year
Money column: the only columns that we need to concern ourselves with are those containing transaction values, in this case there is only one. Budgets Get Real does not pay attention to balance columns, so, don’t count them as a money column.
There appears to be no debit suffix on the transaction value, instead a debit is indicated by a negative sign in front of the transaction amount.
Description: The column that describes the transaction, in this case, column 6. In some statements there is an additional description column that indicates a category for that transaction, in this case there is, this column is column 5.
There are two lines at the beginning of the statement are for “PURCHASE AUTHORISATIONS”. These are purchases that have been made, but the transaction has not been fully processed. We do not want to include these purchase authorisations, because the finalised transactions will appear when you next import your statement, or in a couple of days time. If we do not exclude these ‘Purchase Authorisation’s, both they, and the finalised transactions will import into Budgets Get Real.
Because we do not know that there will be any “Purchase Authorisations” when we next import a statement, or how many of them there will be. We will need to create an “excluded rule”.
Excluded rules discard information from a statement that we do not want to import into Budgets Get Real. They are very simple to set up, as we will show you.
By selecting ‘Excluded rules apply’ you will automatically be requested to enter any ‘rules’ for this statement. In the case of this statement we want to set a rule to exclude any Purchase Authorisations.
SETTING EXCLUDED RULES
To exclude specific transactions Budgets Get Real needs to know where to find them.
In this example we’re going to exclude any transactions with the words ‘Purchase Authorisation’ in them.
We see that ‘PURCHASE AUTHORISATION’ appears in Column 5, so we are going to set a rule to exclude transactions where this occurs.
ALL is used when we’re looking for all of a word, or a number of words. e.g. ‘Purchase Authorisation’
START is used when we’re looking for a string that starts with a certain word, or a number of words. e.g. ‘Purchase Authorisation #123456′. With numbers a start rule is often necessary, because the numbers that follow may always be different.
