Guide 02

Importing statements

Formats Garden reads

Your file is parsed on your device. It is not uploaded anywhere, including for PDF statements — the text extraction runs locally.

What happens when you drop a file in

amount, the merchant. It handles debit/credit column pairs as well as a single signed amount.

anything ambiguous.

merchants you have corrected before, then a built-in merchant list, then the category the bank supplied, then what it has learned from your own history.

1. Garden works out the format, then the columns — which is the date, the
2. It shows you what it found before saving anything, with warnings for
3. It categorises each transaction. Explicit rules you wrote win first, then
4. It flags likely duplicates against what is already in your ledger.

Undoing an import

Every import is recorded as a batch. If it went wrong, undo the batch and every transaction it created is removed. This is safer than deleting rows by hand and is the recommended way to recover from a bad file.

Rules

If you find yourself correcting the same thing repeatedly, write a rule. Rules match on merchant, amount, account, notes or date, combine conditions, and can set a category, add a tag, write a note, or mark a transaction reviewed.

Before saving a rule you can test it against your existing transactions and see exactly how many would change and what they would become. Rules run in an order you control.

Multi-currency

If a statement contains an entry in a currency other than the statement's own, Garden warns rather than converting. It will not invent an exchange rate.

If your bank's file does not work

Send the file — with the amounts changed to nonsense if you would rather, the structure is what matters — to support@garden.khushin.com. Bank CSV exports are gloriously inconsistent and every fixed one helps the next person.