For creating Vendor Accounts, see this article
For general guidance on importing financial history, see this article
This article is specific to vendors that the association pays and creating the appropriate vendor history so that you can look back on any specific vendor and see when and how much you paid over time.
When to use this: You have old bank activity and want each vendorās payment history in Vlge. You are not trying to recreate every old invoice.
The workflow
Get the bank CSV ready first
Financials ā Import tools ā Bank Transactions. Required columns:date,description,amount(negative = money out).
Put a stable payee name in the description - "ABC Trash Company", notACH DEBIT 8841 JPLC. This name is what vendor history matches on.Build vendors from the unique descriptions in that file
Copy the unique payee names out of the CSV. Create those vendors (Vendors ā import or add one by one).
Use the same spelling as the file. Add aliases for legal names, DBAs, old names, and typos (Colorado Depratment of Real Estateā vendor āColorado Department of Real Estateā).
One vendor + aliases when it is the same company.Then import the bank file (Import in Bank Transactions import from Financial Dashboard)
Choose the "manual bank account", preview, import. Categorize rows if you also want them on the GL. Categories do not create vendor history; names do.Check history on the vendor, not the Total Paid card
Open the vendor ā Bank Transactions or All Payments. That is the imported spend.
āTotal Paid is only bills paid in Vlge. A community that imported history and has no paid bills will correctly show $0 there. Journal stays empty for imports because those entries are not tagged to a vendor.Create anyone still missing
If a payee was in the CSV and not in the directory, add that vendor (and alias). Existing imported rows attach automatically. No re-import.
Why vendors-first (from the file), not import-first
Approach | Result |
Unique payees from CSV ā create vendors + aliases ā import | History is on the vendor pages as soon as import finishes |
Import first, then create vendors | Same history, but pages look empty until the leftover vendors exist |
Auto-create a vendor per description | Raw bank memos become junk vendors; same company gets split by spelling |
Vendor history from old bank CSVs is for lookup on the vendor record. It is not a reason to reconcile every old month. Start formal rec at your cutoff.