Kashflow’s time saving feature

When I first used Iris Kashflow, I thought they couldn’t have made their import module more time consuming. Had they not heard about FW Taylor’s time & motion studies I kept asking myself. It’s fine if you’re importing sales or purchase ledger transactions as Kashflow gives you a list of available invoices to allocate against. But if most of your bank transactions need to be posted to anywhere else, e.g. travel, it takes 5 separate clicks or actions to allocate each one.

Yesterday I discovered Kashflow’s “Matching function” in its bank import section. I was working on a client who lives in London and spends a lot of money using public transport. All of their travel related transactions had in their narrative the letters “TFL” (which co-incidentally stands for Transport for London).

In the import module I set up a rule which said if the associated narrative of an imported transaction has the letters “TFL”, then post that transaction to “Travel”. Our client also spends a lot on iTunes so I set up a rule which said if the word “iTunes” is in the narrative take the payment to “Drawings”.

This discovery saved me hours of time as there were 110 separate payments to TFL and another 60 to iTunes. Once the rule’s been set up it is permanent so if your client has the same pattern of expenditure setting up the right rules will save you time every time you import bank transactions.

To set up a rule go to the import module in the bank account section and click on the “Matching Rules” button which is in the top LHS of the screen. Then click on the “Create” button in the top RHS of the screen and in the dialogue box which appears.

• Select if the rule is to apply to money in, money out or both.
• Type in the word “TFL” (for example) in the box which says “Search for”
• Then tick the button which says “transaction”
• Then select the account you want the transaction to go to e.g. “Travel”
• Then press “Save”.

When I had to import the 200 plus sales receipts (our client doesn’t use a sales ledger) I set up two rules which I deleted after the import. Rule one asked if the word “Faster” was included (as in Faster Payments which covered 90% of the transactions) then take the transaction to sales. The second rule was the same as the first except the word “Credit” (which mopped up another 8% of transactions) was used instead of “Faster”. After 5 minutes when I’d finished importing and posting all of the transactions I deleted these two rules. This saved me at least 90 minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

If you wish to learn how to do this too, why don’t you book yourself a training session with us so we can make sure you can do it correctly?