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 the 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 by hand before trying again.
The bad version:
- Open the CSV in Sheets, 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 Google Sheet. It pushes the transaction rows into Zoho Books and then lists the uncategorised ones back to the sheet for your review — in one combined session.
Import all rows from this sheet as bank transactions into the Zoho Books checking account — transaction date from column A, description from column B, debit amount from column C, credit amount from column D
What You Get
- All 200 transactions pushed into the specified Zoho Books bank account.
- Import count returned in a status message.
- Any rows rejected by Zoho Books (format error, missing field) written to a new block starting at row 202 with the error reason.
- Date formatting handled automatically before submission.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The date column uses a non-standard format that Zoho Books rejects
Import all rows from this sheet as Zoho Books bank transactions, converting the date in column A from MM/DD/YYYY to YYYY-MM-DD before submission; debit from column C, credit from column D
The debit and credit amounts are in a single 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; map to the correct debit/credit fields before submission
You want to list all uncategorised transactions after the import for review
After importing all rows from this sheet into the Zoho Books checking account, list all transactions in that account that are still uncategorised and write their transaction ID, date, description, and amount into a new block starting at row 202
Full import-and-review pipeline in one shot
Import all rows from this sheet into the Zoho Books checking account converting dates from MM/DD/YYYY 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 last imported row so I can categorise them
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 Google Sheet, 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.