Bank Statements

Flowtly Editorial Team4 min

Your banks send Flowtly one statement file per account per banking day. Finance & business → Accountancy → Statements is where those files are listed, and where you find out that one of them never arrived.

A missing statement is easy to miss and expensive to find late. A list of the files that did arrive looks complete at a glance — the gap is a day that simply is not there, and nobody notices an absence. By the time a month is being closed, the file may no longer be available to re-request from the bank.

So the list shows the days as well as the files.

One month at a time, grouped by bank

The screen opens on a month and you step through months with the arrows at the top. Up to the 15th it opens on the previous month, which is the one still being reconciled; after that it opens on the current one.

Inside the month, statements are grouped into a section per bank, newest day first. Each section header tells you two things without being opened:

  • how many statements arrived for that bank this month, and
  • how many banking days are missing, if any.

A bank with nothing missing carries no warning at all. That is deliberate: a green "complete" badge on every section is the kind of thing people stop reading, and then the one section that does need attention looks the same as the rest.

Open a section to see the days.

What a missing day looks like

A banking day with no statement is a row of its own, in day order among the days that do have one. It says that no statement was retrieved for that day, and it names the account it is missing for — so on a bank where you hold several accounts, you know which one to chase.

There is nothing to download on such a row, so it offers no download button.

Days that are not missing

Three kinds of empty day are not counted as missing, because treating them as gaps would put a warning on every month and make the real ones invisible.

Weekends and bank holidays. Banks do not send statements on days they are closed. Those days are still drawn, quietly, so the dates run continuously and you can see that nothing was skipped — but they are never counted. Holidays come from your organization's own bank holiday calendar, so a day your calendar treats as a working day is treated as one here too.

Today. A bank sends a day's statement after that day has closed, so the current day is never reported as missing. The last day the list expects a statement for is yesterday.

Days before the account started sending. A statement is only expected from the first day that account ever produced one. Months before you connected an account are not full of warnings about data that was never going to exist.

An account that has never produced a dated statement is not reported on at all. There is nothing to measure against, and Flowtly says nothing rather than claiming the account is complete.

Statements with no date

Statement files imported before Flowtly started recording a statement date have none, and they never will. They cannot be placed on a day, so they are not guessed onto one: they are listed in their own section after the banks, titled Statements without a date, and they page in the usual way.

When a whole bank stops sending

A run of missing days across every account at one bank usually means the connection itself has stopped, rather than individual files going astray. Check whether your bank feed is working — an expired consent is the common cause, and it is fixed by reconnecting.

Connection map

Refers toUses upDerived fromPart ofPlanned vs actual
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
invoice billed to counterparty. invoice taxed by tax-group. cost spends against budget. cost owed to counterparty. bank-transaction reconciled to invoice. bank-connection imports bank-transaction. contract schedules payment-schedule-line. payment-schedule-line invoiced as invoice. contract agreed with counterparty. contract attached to budget. contract orders purchase-order-line. purchase-order-line prices position. purchase-order-line estimated against time-entry. budget raises budget-alert. budget covers project. counterparty defaults to budget. counterparty defaults to project. invoice billed from project. set-off-declaration settles invoice. set-off-declaration declared with counterparty. project linked to budget. tenant-turnover reported by counterparty. tenant-turnover compared per area from contract. utilities-statement calculated for contract. lead becomes counterparty. deal sold to counterparty.billed totaxed byspends againstowed toreconciled toimportsschedulesinvoiced asagreed withattached toorderspricesestimated againstraisescoversdefaults todefaults tobilled fromsettlesdeclared withlinked toreported bycompared per area fromcalculated forbecomessold toIInvoice — A sales document issued to a client: line items, dates, tax. It is created, reviewed, previewed and then sent — or, when it went out some other way, recorded as delivered.InvoiceCCounterparty — The other side of a financial document — a client billed, or a supplier owed.CounterpartyTTax group — The tax treatment applied to a line, so rates are set once rather than per document.Tax groupCCost — Money the organisation owes or has spent, tracked against a budget.CostBBudget — The financial envelope an engagement is measured against — what was planned, versus what has actually been spent.BudgetBBank transaction — A movement on a connected bank account. Matching it to an invoice or a cost is what makes the books agree with the bank.Bank transactionBBank connection — The consented link to one bank that transactions arrive through. It can stop working on its own — a consent expires or is withdrawn — so it reports whether it is still working.Bank connectionCContract — The financial terms of an engagement: a structured set of payment schedule lines, in one direction or the other.ContractPPayment schedule line — One dated amount on a contract, in a direction — money owed to a supplier, or due from a client.Payment schedule lineOOrder line — One line of a purchase order: a role priced by the hour with the hours estimated for it, or a deliverable priced as an outcome. A deliverable carries no hours at all.Order linePPosition — The catalogue of job titles a project role is drawn from.PositionTTime entry — What actually happened — work time logged against a project.Time entryBBudget alert — A notice that a budget has gone off plan - spending over the planned amount, or a margin below the one that was planned. It is raised by a daily check rather than by anyone asking for it.Budget alertPProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectSSet-off declaration — A record that your invoices to one counterparty and its cost documents were settled against each other, in amounts that balance exactly. It lowers what remains due on the invoices; it is not a payment.Set-off declarationTTenant turnover — A tenant's reported sales for one month, entered by staff and used for reporting only. An absent figure means not reported, which is a different statement from a reported zero.Tenant turnoverUUtilities statement — One lease's electricity for one month, the kWh its meters recorded times the tariff in force. A draft until finalised, then it never changes; a correction is a new draft.Utilities statementPProspect — A company you are working but that is not a customer yet. It sits at New, Contacted or Qualified, and everything done to it is logged against it.ProspectDDeal — A sale in progress: a customer, an amount, and the stage it has reached. It cannot exist without a customer, and its stage is never blank.Deal