Bank connection and CSV import

Bank transactions are the base of your books in Norman: Norman links them to invoices and documents and marks invoices as paid from them. You add transactions in three ways: through a bank connection, from a CSV file or by hand.

Connect your bank

1. Open Accounting, tab Transactions, and click Sync your bank. You can also go to Account → Bank accounts and click Add bank account.
2. Choose your bank from the popular banks or click See all banks.
3. Log in to your bank and agree to share the account data.

The connection runs through a licensed account information service provider. Norman only reads transactions: it does not order transfers from your account. The list includes PKO Bank Polski, ING, mBank, Bank Pekao, Erste Bank Polska, BNP Paribas, Bank Millennium and Alior Bank, among others. How much history the bank shares on the first connection depends on the bank.

The number of connected accounts depends on your plan.

Import a CSV statement

If your bank is not listed, or you want to add older transactions, import a statement.

1. Download your account history as a CSV file in your online banking.
2. In Norman, open Accounting, tab Transactions, click Add transaction and choose Import transactions.
3. In Amounts in this file, keep Automatic (use positive and negative signs). If the file does not tell income and expenses apart by sign, choose Expenses (all amounts) or Income (all amounts).
4. In Category, keep Automatic (rules and categorization) or choose one category for every row.
5. Drop in the CSV or ZIP file.

Norman recognises the file layout itself. It knows the statement formats of Alior Bank, mBank, PKO BP, ING, Pekao and Santander, and recognises other banks' files from their column headers. It reads Polish characters from files in UTF-8, Windows-1250 and ISO-8859-2.

If a JDG moved to Norman during the year, transactions from before its first month in Norman do not affect its reports: you enter those months as year-to-date totals. See Getting started: a JDG in Norman.

Add a transaction by hand

A cash payment, or one from an account you do not connect, you add with Add transaction and Create manually.

Transactions in other currencies

Norman converts a transaction on a foreign-currency account into złoty at the NBP average rate of the last business day before its date. Until NBP publishes the rate, the list shows a dash instead of the PLN amount, and the details say Waiting for the NBP rate. You need to do nothing: Norman converts it once the rate is available. For taxes, Norman uses no rate other than NBP's.

Private withdrawals and refunds

• Mark a transfer to a JDG owner's private account with the private withdrawal category. It stays out of the KPiR.
• Mark money back from a supplier or to a client with Is it a refund?. A refund to a client reduces revenue, and a refund from a supplier reduces the cost.

What Norman does not do yet

• It does not connect to every Polish bank. If your bank is not listed, import CSV statements.
• It has no manual mapping of CSV columns: Norman recognises the layout itself.
• It does not send transfers, for example for tax or ZUS: you pay them in your bank.