Banking and reconciliation
Get the bank's version of events into the ledger. Then prove the two agree.
Importing a statement
Download the file from your bank and import it. Two formats cover almost everyone.
OFX and QFX
Nearly every bank offers this one. It is usually labeled "download to Quicken" or "download to Money."
Credit-card statements work too. They are a different structure inside the same file format, and that is where a lot of importers fall over.
The duplicate problem. Every transaction in an OFX file carries an identifier the bank gave it. Moab Ledger keeps those and will not import the same one twice.
Here is the detail that matters. The check is scoped to the account, not to the statement.
Say you download January. Later you are not sure what you already imported, so you download December through January to be safe. If the check were per statement, January would come in twice. Every transaction doubled, your reconciliation ruined, and no error anywhere.
Scoped to the account, overlapping downloads are safe. Which is what people actually do.
CSV
For banks whose export is a spreadsheet. And for the ones whose OFX is broken.
It works out the delimiter itself. It does that by consistency, not by counting. Say every row splits into the same number of fields on semicolons. Then the file is semicolon-delimited — even if commas appear more often inside the descriptions.
That is not a made-up case. It is how European bank exports look, because there the comma is the decimal mark.
It handles both shapes of amount column. Some banks give one signed column. Others give separate debit and credit columns. Of those, some write withdrawals as positive numbers and some write them negative. All of it reads correctly.
It remembers the layout. Tell it once which column is the date, which is the description, and which is the amount. It saves that against the bank. The next statement from that bank imports without asking again.
Would you rather confirm every time? Turn off the auto-detection and the saved layouts in settings. They genuinely switch off. It is not a checkbox that does nothing.
Reconciliation
Match what came from the bank against what is in the ledger. Tick off what has cleared. Reconcile to the closing balance on the statement.
Outstanding items carry forward and are listed one by one — checks written but not presented, deposits in transit.
So the gap between your balance and the bank's is always a list you can look at. It is never a single unexplained number you are expected to accept.
Feeds are coming, and they are optional
Today you download the file yourself. That works well, and the identifier on each transaction is what makes overlapping imports safe.
A live feed is coming as an extra you can choose. Another company supplies the connection to your bank, and they charge for it every month. We would pass that cost through rather than fold it into the license. You should not pay for a bank connection you did not ask for.
Downloading the file stays free, and stays supported.