Accounting and Bookkeeping

Scoutworks separates "what your bank says happened" from "what's in your books". This article walks through how money flows through the app from start to finish, and what each part of the Accounting page is for.

The big idea: Bank Inbox vs Ledger

Two surfaces, two jobs. Once you have this clear, the rest of finance in Scoutworks is straightforward.

Surface	What's in it	What it answers
Bank Inbox	Lines from your bank that haven't been reviewed yet — fresh imports, suggested matches, items you've parked for later.	"What's hit my bank account that I haven't dealt with?"
Ledger	Transactions that are part of your books — categorised, attributed, ready for reports.	"What's in my accounts?"

A bank line stays in the Bank Inbox until you decide what it is. The act of reviewing it — matching it to an existing transaction, creating a fresh one, marking it as a transfer between your own accounts, or ignoring it as noise — is what promotes it into the Ledger. Reports, budgets, restricted fund balances and your year-end totals all read from the Ledger.

This means your Ledger stays clean. Anything you haven't reviewed sits safely in the Inbox and doesn't pollute your figures.

The workflow at a glance

Four steps, in order:

Imports come in. Upload a CSV bank statement from your bank's online banking.
They land in the Bank Inbox. Every imported line waits here until reviewed. Scoutworks suggests likely matches at the top of the list.
You review each line. For each one you choose Match, Create, Transfer, Park, or Ignore (more on these below).
Reviewed lines move to the Ledger. Matched, Created and Transfer lines are now in your books and show up in reports. Parked lines stay in the Inbox under the "Parked" filter; Ignored lines are hidden away but never deleted.

That's the whole workflow. Everything else on the Accounting page — Restricted Funds, Budgets, Settings — reads from the Ledger.

Step 1 — Getting transactions into Scoutworks

There are two ways money enters Scoutworks:

Importing a bank statement

For most groups this is the main route. Open the Finance Actions dropdown (top right of the Accounting page) and select Import Statement. The wizard handles CSV exports from most major UK banks — Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds, HSBC, Starling, Monzo — plus generic CSVs.

Scoutworks remembers what it imported last time. If you re-upload an overlapping statement, lines that match a previous import are skipped and you'll see "X rows skipped as duplicates" in the import summary. Safe to re-upload, in other words.

For the full step-by-step, see Bank Reconciliation and Restricted Funds.

Recording a transaction by hand

For cash, cheques or anything that hasn't shown up on the bank yet, open Finance Actions → Add Transaction. Manual entries go straight into the Ledger without passing through the Inbox — you've already told Scoutworks what they are at the point of entry.

Field	Notes
Transaction Type	Income, Expense, or Transfer
Amount (£)	The transaction amount
Date	When the transaction occurred
Description	What it was for
Bank Account	Which account the money moved through
Category	From your Chart of Accounts
Section	Which section this relates to (optional)
Event	Link to a specific event (optional)
Restricted Fund	Assign to a restricted fund (optional)
Budget	Assign to a budget line (optional)
Gift Aid fields	For eligible income transactions

You'll need treasurer access to add transactions.

Step 2 — The Bank Inbox

Open the Bank Inbox tab on the Accounting page. The count badge shows how many lines need your attention. Anything you've parked doesn't count toward the badge — those are explicitly deferred.

The filter chips along the top let you focus:

Needs action — the default. Imports waiting for a decision.
All — everything in the Inbox, whatever its state.
Imported — fresh CSV lines with no suggested match yet.
Suggested — lines where Scoutworks has spotted a likely match in the Ledger.
Parked — lines you've set aside with a note.
Ignored — lines you've marked as not relevant.

Lines with high-confidence suggestions float to the top so you can dispatch the easy ones first.

Step 3 — Reviewing a line: the four verbs

Click any row to open the Reconcile drawer. Every Inbox line gets resolved by exactly one of four actions, with Ignore as a fifth, soft option. The drawer shows you the bank line on one side and your options on the other.

Verb	When to use it	What you provide
Match	The bank line matches a transaction you've already recorded — a manual entry, a settled expense claim, or a system-generated payout.	Confirm the suggested match, or pick a different one from the list.
Create	The bank line is something genuinely new — a one-off donation, a venue hire fee, an item you bought directly.	Counterparty, category (required), description.
Transfer	Money moving between two of your own bank accounts (e.g. current → savings).	The destination account. Scoutworks handles both sides as a single transfer.
Park	You don't know what this is yet — you need to ask the volunteer who paid in, or check a paper receipt.	A short note. Stays in the Inbox under "Parked".
Ignore	A bank line that should never reach your books — a duplicate, a fee already accounted for elsewhere, a personal transaction posted to the wrong account.	Nothing. The line never touches the Ledger but is kept under "Ignored" so you can see what you've dismissed.

The confidence chips on suggestions tell you how sure Scoutworks is:

Green chip — high confidence (90% or more). Usually safe to confirm.
Amber chip — medium confidence (50–89%). Worth a glance before confirming.
No chip — no suggestion. The Match tab opens with a search field so you can find the right Ledger entry yourself.

Bulk actions

Select two or more rows and a sticky action bar appears at the bottom of the screen with Categorise, Park, Ignore and Cancel. Useful for clearing out a batch of bank fees or other repetitive noise. There's deliberately no bulk action when nothing is selected — that's a guard against fat-fingering 200 rows.

Auto-Match

If you've got a stack of high-confidence suggestions (green chips), the Auto-Match button at the top of the Inbox confirms them all in one click. Scoutworks only auto-matches lines it's 90% or more sure about — you keep the safety of reviewing the amber and no-chip ones by hand.

Step 4 — The Ledger

Switch to the Ledger tab to see your books: every transaction that's been recorded manually, created from the Inbox, or matched from a bank line. This is what your reports, budgets, restricted fund balances and year-end totals read from.

The Ledger shows everything you'd expect: date, description, category, section, event, fund, budget, amount. Click any row to open it for editing or to attach a receipt — see Attaching Receipts to Transactions.

If a Ledger row was created by Matching or Creating from the Inbox, you'll see a small reference back to the bank line so you can trace it.

Searching the Ledger

The search box above the list matches a transaction's description, payee and reference — and its amount. If you know a payment was £85 but not who it came from, type 85 and you'll get every £85 transaction, income and expense alike.

What you type	What it finds
`85`	Every transaction for exactly £85.00
`£85`	The same — the pound sign is optional
`85.50`	Exactly £85.50
`1,234.50`	Exactly £1,234.50 — commas are fine

Anything that isn't a plain money value is treated as ordinary text, so Tesco or camp fees works just as it always did.

Filtering the Ledger

Click Filter to narrow the list:

Filter	What it narrows to
Type	Income or Expense
Category	A single category, or Uncategorised
Bank Account	One of your accounts
Transaction Source	How the transaction got into Scoutworks — see below
Reconciliation	Reconciled or Unreconciled
Section	Transactions attributed to a section
Event	Transactions attributed to an event
Restricted Fund	Transactions against a fund
Budget	Transactions against a budget line
Receipt	With receipt or Missing receipt
Gift Aid	Declaration, GASDS, or Not Eligible

Transaction Source is the one worth knowing about. Subs collected by Direct Debit can easily outnumber everything else in your books, and this filter is how you get them out of the way:

Option	What it shows
All Sources	Everything (the default)
Direct Debit (GoCardless)	Subs and other payments collected by Direct Debit
Excluding Direct Debit	Everything that isn't a Direct Debit collection — usually what you want when reviewing the month's real activity
Added Manually	Transactions you typed in yourself
Bank Statement Import	Lines that came in from a CSV statement

Saved views on the Ledger

Above the list you'll find a row of ready-made view pills. Click one to apply its filters instantly. These are set up for every group — you can't rename or delete them, but you can save your own alongside them.

View	What it shows
All Transactions	Everything in your books
Uncategorised	Transactions still needing a category — your tidy-up list
Unreconciled	Transactions not yet reconciled — your year-end list
Direct Debit	Only payments collected by Direct Debit
Excluding Direct Debit	Everything except Direct Debit collections
Income	Money in
Expenses	Money out

For how to save, pin, reorder and share views of your own, see Saved Views and Filters.

Closing the accounting period

When you reach year-end (or any other period boundary), open Finance Actions → Close Accounting Period. Scoutworks checks for blockers first:

Uncategorised transactions must be categorised.
Unresolved expense claims must be approved or rejected.
Unreconciled Inbox items are flagged as recommended (but not required — Parked items can stay parked).

Once you confirm, the period's transactions are locked and a new period starts. This action can't be undone, so the dialog gives you a balance summary first.

What's next

Bank Reconciliation and Restricted Funds — the detailed import wizard walk-through and how restricted funds work.
Budgets and Financial Reports — set up budgets and generate reports for your committee.
Chart of Accounts — customise the categories used across your accounting.
Attaching Receipts to Transactions — keep the paper trail your independent examiner expects.