Import Bank Transactions Into Zoho Books From an Excel workbook

The Scenario

You're the bookkeeper. The bank sent a CSV of 200 transactions from last month. You need to import them into the right Zoho Books bank account, and then handle the 30 transactions that won't auto-categorise — the ones Zoho Books couldn't match to existing rules. Your review window is this afternoon before reconciliation needs to sign off.

The new hire did this last month by uploading the CSV directly into Zoho Books. Zoho rejected 18 of the 200 rows because the date format didn't match, and she spent an hour reformatting the CSV in Excel by hand before trying again.

The bad version:

• Open the CSV in Excel, reformat the date column from MM/DD/YYYY to the format Zoho Books expects.
• Separate the combined amount column into separate debit and credit columns if needed.
• Upload the CSV into Zoho Books via the bank account import tool.
• Go to uncategorised transactions, sort through the 30 that didn't match, categorise each one manually.

The 200-transaction import is the easy part. It's the 30 uncategorised ones — each requiring you to look at the description, decide the category, and click through the categorisation screen — that consume the afternoon.

The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI

SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It pushes the transaction rows into Zoho Books and then lists the uncategorised ones back to the workbook for your review — in one combined session.

List all uncategorised bank transactions in my Zoho Books checking account and write transaction ID, date, description, and amount into this sheet so I can review and categorise them

What You Get

• All uncategorised transactions in the specified Zoho Books account written to the workbook.
• Columns: Transaction ID, Date, Description, Amount.
• Count of uncategorised transactions returned in a status message.
• Transactions sorted by date descending.

What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready

The date column uses a non-standard format

Import all rows from this workbook as Zoho Books bank transactions, converting dates in column A from MM/DD/YYYY to YYYY-MM-DD before submission; debit from column C, credit from column D

The amounts are in one combined column with negatives for credits

Import all rows as Zoho Books bank transactions using date from column A, description from column B, and the amount in column C — treat positive values as debits and negative values as credits

You want to categorise the uncategorised ones from the workbook after import

After importing all rows from this workbook into the Zoho Books checking account, list all still-uncategorised transactions and write them into a new block starting below the last imported row so I can review and categorise them

Full import-and-review pipeline in one shot

Import all rows from this workbook into the Zoho Books checking account, converting dates to YYYY-MM-DD and splitting combined amounts into debit and credit fields; then list all uncategorised transactions in that account and write transaction ID, date, description, and amount into a new block starting below the imported data

The pattern: ask for the format conversion, the import, and the uncategorised pull in one prompt.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your bank transactions Excel workbook, then ask it to push all 200 rows into Zoho Books and surface the uncategorised ones for review. See also how to post period-end journal entries or return to the Zoho Books integration overview.