I’m trying out Actual and have imported my bank’s (Sparkasse) data for my checking account via CSV. In the CSV import, I obviously had to set the correct fields and was a bit confused because Actual only has the “Payee” field while my CSVs have IBAN, BIC and a free text name (i.e. “Employer GmbH”.)
IBAN is preferable because it’s a unique ID while the free text name can be empty or possibly even change(?). (Don’t know how that works.)
OTOH, the free text name is preferable because I (as a human) can use it to infer the actual payee while the IBANs are just a bunch of numbers.
Is it possible to use IBAN aswell as the free text name or have a mapping between IBAN and a display name?
How do you handle that?
Hm, the payee is actually just a text list that doesn‘t store any related IDs. In this case, you would use Employer GmbH as payee, and the transaction notes (i.e. Gehalt 01/2023) as notes. Payees need to be curated from time to time (removed, merged, etc).
I moved away from auto importing and simply import manually, due to the many possible payees used by subsidaries (ebay sarl, ebay AG, etc), causing me troubles :D
If you like, you can post an anonymized CSV so I can check out how it would import :)
the payee is actually just a text list that doesn‘t store any related IDs
It is however used as an ID.
In this case, you would use Employer GmbH as payee, and the transaction notes (i.e. Gehalt 01/2023) as notes.
That’s what I’m doing; free text payees (manually deduplicated, not that bad) and “Verwendungszweck” as notes.
I am currently toying around with the results.
I moved away from auto importing and simply import manually
“Manually” as in manually exporting the CSV, importing it and then cleaning it up or actually manually entering the data from your statements?
Sorry :) I‘m entering them completely manually, and anything that comes in (or rather goes out 🥲) is done via schedules. Whilst you need to post them manually, the details (payee, amount, date) are prefilles. You could also check out GoCardless, which syncs via PSD2. But it seems to have troubles with related entries (e.g. Vorgemerkt and gebucht umsätze are entered regardless, so you may have duplicates where one‘s amount will have to be set to 0.
