Bank Statements

Processing your bank statement is where most of your bookkeeping happens — every line is either a customer payment, supplier payment, bank fee, or other transaction that needs to be recorded.

Two ways to process

Manual: open Payment Entries one by one for each line on your bank statement, mark which invoices they settle.

Bank Reconciliation Tool: upload your bank statement (CSV or MT940 from most Dutch banks), ERPNext matches transactions to existing Payment Entries or helps you create them. Much faster for high-volume.

Using the Bank Reconciliation Tool

Bank Reconciliation Tool:

Pick your Bank Account (matches the bank account in ERPNext)
From / To Date range
Upload Bank Statement — CSV exported from your bank's portal, or MT940 from many Dutch banks

ERPNext lists every transaction from the statement and tries to auto-match each to:

An existing Payment Entry (because you already recorded it)
A Sales Invoice (so it can suggest creating a Payment Entry)
A Purchase Invoice (same)

For each line you can:

Reconcile — match to an existing entry
Create Payment Entry — make a new one inline
Skip — for transfers between your own accounts, bank fees, etc. (handle via Journal Entry)

Matching rules

The tool matches on:

Amount
Date (within a tolerance you set)
Reference number (if the bank line carries it)
Customer / Supplier name in the description

You can tune the matching rules per bank account.

Bank file formats

Most Dutch banks export:

CSV — generic, supported by all banks
MT940 — older standard but very common with ING, ABN AMRO, Rabobank
CAMT.053 — the newer SEPA standard, used by all major NL banks

ERPNext parses all three. Pick the format your bank gives you cleanest exports for.

Frequency

Best practice: reconcile weekly. Easier to spot a missing entry when there are 20 lines to review than when there are 400 at month-end.

Common situations

Bank line is a transfer between two of your accounts — make a Journal Entry that debits one bank account and credits the other; reconcile both bank lines against the same Journal Entry
Bank line is a fee — create a Journal Entry (debit Bank Charges, credit Bank Account); reconcile
Bank line for a customer who paid the wrong amount — create the Payment Entry with the actual amount; if underpaid, the invoice becomes Partly Paid (the customer owes the rest)