You do not need to connect a bank to create or share an expense report. If your bank's verification step is not working, use the records you already have and choose the statement upload that matches your purpose:
| What you need | Where to go | What the upload does |
|---|---|---|
| Check card purchases against receipts | My Reports → Review expenses → Match card activity | Reads charges from a credit-card statement and shows matched charges, missing receipts, and credits/refunds. It does not silently add every charge as an expense. |
| Add missing income from a bank account | Add Income → Log Income → From screenshot or PDF | Proposes money-in rows from a bank statement PDF for you to review before saving them to Income. |
| Match bank deposits automatically or add bank tabs to Year-End | Add Income → Match bank deposits, or the Bank Account row in Year-End Tax Workbook | Requires a supported live Plaid bank connection. A manual PDF import does not populate the Year-End Bank Transactions/Bank Summary tabs or make the bank connection live. |
Credit-card purchases: PDF or CSV
- Download a transaction-level credit-card statement from your card issuer. One full-year PDF is fine if it contains individual dated transactions, not just category totals. You can also use a transaction CSV.
- In ExpenseBot, click My Reports, then Review expenses, then Match card activity.
- If no card is connected, click PDF Statement (or Upload CSV for a CSV). If a card is already connected, click Upload a statement. Select the file; processing starts after selection.
- Review Missing Receipts, Matched, and Credits & Refunds. Confirm near-matches; add or dismiss only the items you recognize. Card payments and transfers are not new purchases.
- If you entered from a month in the Year-End Tax Workbook, choose Complete Reconciliation only after checking that month. Merely opening or closing a month does not verify it.
If an annual PDF has only totals and no itemized transactions, download a transaction export (usually CSV) from the card issuer instead. Work with one export at a time; do not stitch separate statement files together.
Bank-account deposits: PDF
- Download an itemized bank-account statement PDF for the period you need. A full-year PDF can be read if it contains the individual deposits and is within the 10 MB upload limit; otherwise use smaller statement PDFs or a CSV export.
- Click Add Income (the plus-icon button), then Log Income, then From screenshot or PDF. For a CSV, click From CSV instead.
- Select the file. ExpenseBot proposes incoming-payment rows. Check the date, payer, amount, category, and currency on every row. Remove transfers between your own accounts, refunds that are not business income, and income already recorded. Correct anything the PDF reader got wrong.
- Click Save Income for one selected row or Save N Entries for several. Only the rows you selected are saved to the Income sheet.
This is an income import, not bank reconciliation: it does not import the complete bank ledger into Year-End, match bank deposits to existing income via Plaid, or automatically prove that every deposit is taxable income. For the spending side of a bank-account statement, a transaction CSV can be checked against receipts under Review expenses → Match card activity; review unmatched payments because not every debit has a receipt.
Existing and older reports
Open an existing report under My Reports and share it with your accountant if it already covers the year you need. Bank connection is optional. Connecting a bank today cannot retrieve an arbitrarily old tax year: Plaid requests at most the previous 730 days when an account is first linked. Use the bank's own older statements for older years.
Reports are snapshots. If you add or correct income or expenses after creating a Year-End report, return to My Reports → Year-End Tax Workbook and generate a new report so the new records are included. Do not upload a whole bank statement through the ordinary receipt uploader: use the purpose-specific paths above.