The Entry Workflow is a complete, step-by-step process for handling a bank statement from start to finish. It guides you through uploading files, classifying expenses, recording cash activity, reconciling accounts, and tracking income — all in one place.
You’ll find it under Entry Workflow in the navigation. A stepper across the top of every step shows where you are in the process; you can click any available or unlocked step to jump to it. Before completing the workflow, you can navigate back to earlier transaction steps to review or change your work. During the transaction portion of the workflow, Simple-C carries your selected business, bank, and file import between steps so you don’t have to re-pick them.
Before you start
The transaction steps — from Upload through Complete — work with a specific business, bank account, and, once selected, file import. Before entering those steps, select the business and bank you want to work on — either from the dashboard’s Workflow Files card (which drops you straight into the right step) or from the global business and bank selectors. The stepper preserves that transaction context as you move among those steps.
The later destinations use narrower context. Reports carries the selected business and year into the reports center. Vehicles is a bridge to the dedicated Mileage module and does not continue the file-import transaction context.
The 11 steps of the Entry Workflow
1. Upload
Upload the bank statement you want to process. Simple-C accepts two file formats:
- PDF — the statement is sent for automatic transaction extraction. You can check the processing status and retry if extraction fails.
- CSV — you upload the file, then map its columns (date, amount, description, etc.) to Simple-C’s fields before the transactions are imported.
Pick the business, the bank account, and the file. Once the transactions are extracted or mapped, Simple-C prepares them for the next step. You can also delete a pending import from this step if you uploaded the wrong file.
2. Expenses
Review and classify the imported transactions. Simple-C suggests a category for each transaction based on the description and your past classifications; you confirm or change it. Helpful actions on this step:
- Auto-classify — lets Simple-C attempt to categorize any unclassified transactions in bulk.
- Approve drafts — confirms draft expense entries so they become finalized.
- Move to income — reclassifies a transaction that’s actually a deposit (income) instead of an expense.
- Bulk update / bulk delete — edit or remove several transactions at once.
- Add manually — create a new expense entry that wasn’t on the statement.
3. Cash Receipt
Record cash expenses that don’t appear on the bank statement (paid in cash, paid by someone else, reimbursed out-of-pocket, etc.) so the books reflect the full picture. You can add, edit, and delete cash receipt entries, update them in bulk, or move a cash receipt over to Cash Income if it was actually income.
4. Reconcile Expenses
Match the imported and cash expenses against your records to make sure nothing is missing or duplicated. This step catches errors before they reach your reports. You can review the reconciled data by date range and delete any duplicate or incorrect entries in bulk.
5. Income
Enter the income deposited into the bank account during the period — payments received, sales, and any other revenue. You can add income entries, update them, delete them, and bulk-update the income type. There’s also a special action to mark a deposit as Interest Earned and a Move to expenses option for deposits that were actually expenses.
6. Cash Income
Record cash income that didn’t go through the bank — important for any business that handles cash. As with cash receipts, you can add, edit, delete, and bulk-update entries, or move a cash income record back to Cash Receipt if it was actually an expense.
7. Reconcile Income
Match the recorded income against the bank deposits so the totals line up. Like the expense reconciliation, this step lets you review by date range and delete duplicates or incorrect entries in bulk.
8. Complete
Mark the workflow as complete for the period. This imports the staged expenses and income into the official records and recalculates the monthly summaries. Once a workflow is completed, the earlier editing steps (Expenses through Reconcile Income) are locked — you can no longer navigate back to edit or reclassify that import’s transactions. Review everything carefully before completing.
Note: Completing also cleans up the temporary staging records used during the workflow, so the final books stay clean.
9. Summary Report
Review the month-by-month balance, expenses, and income for the year. The beginning balance for January is editable; everything else is calculated from the entries you’ve made. You can update individual summary values (for example, to correct a beginning balance) and the totals refresh automatically.
10. Reports
Jump to the full Simple-C reports center to generate the standard reports you need — Profit & Loss, Expenses by Category, Income & Expense, and more — for your records or your accountant. Only the selected business and year are carried into reporting; the bank and file-import context from the transaction steps is not required there.
11. Vehicles
This step is a bridge to the dedicated Mileage module. It links you to the full Vehicle Mileage Management page (under Vehicles in the sidebar), where you add business vehicles and log monthly mileage for tax deductions. It may pass along the selected business, but it does not share the bank or file-import transaction context. No vehicle data is handled directly in this step — see the Mileage article for details on managing vehicles and mileage.
Tips for using the Entry Workflow
- Work through the steps in order — each one builds on the last. Upload before classifying, classify before reconciling, reconcile before completing.
- Use the stepper at the top to jump to any available or unlocked step. Before completion, you can return to earlier transaction steps to review your work. The Complete step locks those editing steps, so finalize your changes before completing.
- Reconcile shortly after classifying, while the context is still fresh — it’s much easier to spot a missing or duplicate transaction then.
- Use bulk actions (auto-classify, bulk update, bulk delete) to speed up large statements with many similar transactions.
- Don’t forget cash activity. Steps 3 and 6 ensure your cash expenses and income are captured even when they never hit the bank.
- Complete all steps before generating final reports for the year. The Summary and Reports steps rely on the data being finalized.
- Start from the dashboard’s Workflow Files card when possible — clicking a bank there drops you into the Upload step with the right business and bank already selected.