Switching from a spreadsheet
If your money lives in a spreadsheet, or in files downloaded from your bank, Clementine can read them. Any bank’s CSV works; some are recognised without any help.
1. Get your transactions as a CSV file
From your bank
Internet banking has an export or download on an account’s transaction list, with CSV as one of the formats. The clicks differ from bank to bank, so follow your bank’s own help page. Choose CSV, and the widest date range it offers.
In Up, it is under Activity, then Insights: scroll down to Export transactions.
From a spreadsheet
Save the sheet as CSV, with a header row. Columns named Date, Description and Amount are picked up by name. Separate Debit and Credit columns work too. Clementine does not open Excel workbooks directly.
2. Import into Clementine
- Open Account, then Your data, and choose Import. Pick A bank’s CSV file.
- Choose one file or several. Several accounts, or several date ranges of one account, can go in together; rows that overlap are found and left out.
- Check how it reads. A recognised bank needs nothing from you. For any other layout, say which column is the date, which is the description and which is the amount. Clementine remembers that on your device for the next file with the same layout.
- Choose which account each file belongs to, or create one.
- Review. Narrow the date range, untick any row, pick a category for a row if you like. Then import.
Banks recognised automatically
CommBank, Westpac, NAB, ANZ, ING, Macquarie, Up and Bankwest files are recognised from what is in the file, never from its name. Any other bank’s CSV works too: you tell Clementine which column is which once, and it remembers.
- CommBank
- Westpac
- NAB
- ANZ
- ING
- Macquarie
- Up
- Bankwest
A layout is only given a name when it has been confirmed from the bank’s own page or from more than one independent description. If your bank is not listed, nothing is wrong: its file goes through the same reader, with one extra step the first time.
What comes across
- The date, the description, the amount and whether it was money in or out.
- The bank’s own note on the transaction, where its file has one.
Each row arrives without a category unless you pick one in the review step, and waits in the review queue. How to clear the review queue
What does not come across
- Your bank’s categories and tags. Banks sort differently from each other and from you, so Clementine starts clean.
- Balances. A balance column is read to check the layout, not stored.
- Pending transactions that your bank leaves out of its export.
- Formulas, formatting and extra sheets in a spreadsheet. A CSV is the values of one sheet.
- Transactions in another currency, unless the file also gives the Australian-dollar amount. They are listed as not read.
Odd files
The reader copes with the usual quirks: semicolons or tabs in place of commas, a description with a line break inside it, amounts written as (45.00) or -$3.10 or 1.234,56, and files saved by older Windows software. If every date in the file could be day first or month first, it asks you which.
The same for every import.
- It is free
- Importing is part of every plan, including Free.
- Your file stays with you
- It is read on your own phone or computer. Only the rows you confirm are saved to your account, and the file itself is never stored.
- You see every row first
- Each row has a tick box. Nothing is added until you say so.
- Duplicates are left out
- Rows you already have, from an earlier import or from your bank feed, are found and unticked. Importing the same file twice adds nothing.
- You can undo it
- For 30 days an import can be removed as a whole, from Account, Your data. It takes out exactly the rows that import added.
- What cannot be read is listed
- A row with a date that is not a date, or an amount that is not a number, is shown with the reason and left out. The rest still import.
Files it reads: .csv, .tsv and .txt, or a .zip of them, up to 60 MB each. It does not read PDF statements, Excel workbooks (save the sheet as CSV first), OFX or QIF.
Dates are read day first, the Australian way, unless the file shows otherwise. If every date in a file could be read both ways, you are asked before anything is imported.
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