How to import a bank statement in MYOB

Statement imports are MYOB's option for accounts with no bank feed. An account that does have a feed only needs one for transactions from before the feed was activated. MYOB's statement help says statements matter most if you only enter invoices and major purchases yourself, because the statement supplies everything else; if you key in every transaction, you may only need it to check bank charges and your own accuracy.

Get the file from your internet banking website. Save it as a .QIF or .OFX file, pick the dd/mm/yy date format if your bank offers a choice, and keep it under 10MB. Your bank's website, or your bank, can explain how to download it. Each line in a statement carries the date, the amount, whether money came in or went out, the type of transaction, and a name and description.

Check the dates the file covers. Transactions dated before the Opening balance month in your Business settings can't be imported, and neither can ones before a lock date. Statements don't have to go in date order, so an earlier one can follow a later one. For a backlog of several months, MYOB suggests importing and reconciling a month at a time.

1. Download the statement file from your internet banking website.
2. In MYOB, go to the Banking menu and choose Banking hub.
3. Find the account the statement belongs to, click its three dots (...) and choose Import statement.
4. On the Bank statement import history page, click Import statement.
5. Choose the Bank account the transactions should go into, then click Import statement file.
6. On the Import statement file page, click Browse. In the Open window, select the statement file and click Open.
7. Click Import.
8. Check the message at the top of the screen, which says how many statement lines were imported. The file is now listed on the Bank statement import history page.
9. To import another statement, for this account or a different one, start again from step 3.

The statement's lines become bank transactions on the Bank transactions page, so you can set up rules for them and work through them much as you would with a bank feed. Each import is recorded on the account's Bank statement import history page.

An import can be taken back by deleting the statement. Open the Banking hub, click the three dots (...) for the account and choose Import statement, then click the delete icon for the statement and confirm with Delete. The statement and its bank transactions are removed from MYOB.

Single lines can't be deleted from an imported statement, because they stand for what actually happened in the bank account. If a statement holds transactions you don't want, change its date range before downloading it. A record you entered in MYOB that corresponds to one of those lines, such as an invoice or a bill, can still be deleted the usual way.

A statement in a period with locked transactions can't be deleted until those transactions are unlocked. And a deleted statement imported again comes in fresh, so its transactions have to be categorised or matched again.

Duplicates after an import usually mean the statement covered dates your bank feed had already brought in. MYOB's fix is to delete that statement, get a fresh download from your bank that covers only dates not yet in MYOB, and import it.

If the import succeeds but zero transactions come in, they're probably dated before the Opening balance date or a lock date. Click your business name and choose Business settings: the Financial year section shows the Opening balance date, and the Lock date section below it shows any lock date. A statement brought in for the wrong account, or with the wrong dates, is fixed by deleting it and importing the right one.

If you use AccountRight on the desktop, statements are imported from the Reconcile Accounts window in the Banking command centre with Get Statement, and OFX, QFX, QIF and OFC files are accepted. Lines are matched by cheque number, date and amount, and any left over appear in the Unmatched Statement Transactions window, where you match each one to an existing transaction or add it as spend money or receive money.