Duplicates

A transaction counted twice makes your books wrong in a way that is hard to spot: income looks higher, expenses look higher, and your reconciliation won’t balance. Bokapsys checks every incoming statement against what is already in your books, so you can upload freely without keeping track of what you have already imported.

What Bokapsys catches

The same file twice

Bokapsys recognises a file by its contents, not its name. If you upload a file it already has, even renamed, nothing is imported and you see That file is already in your books. The same applies if two people upload the same file at the same moment.

Statements that overlap

Bank statements often overlap. A quarterly statement repeats months you uploaded individually, or a download covers a few days you already had. Bokapsys imports the file, sets aside the transactions it already has, and imports only the new ones.

When you upload several files together, Bokapsys works through them in order and checks each one against the files before it in the same batch, not just against what was in your books beforehand.

A file and a bank feed

If you uploaded a statement file for an account and later connect the same account through a live bank feed, or the other way round, the same transaction can arrive from both. Bokapsys checks files and feeds against each other, so it is only counted once. A bank feed also never sends the same transaction twice, because each one carries the bank’s own reference. When a sync finds that everything the bank sent is already in your books, it tells you so, for example “All 157 statements from Chase are already in your books, so nothing was added twice”, rather than reporting that nothing was imported.

The same statement in two formats

The same month downloaded as both a PDF and a spreadsheet often doesn’t look identical. Dates can be a day apart and descriptions worded differently. When Bokapsys sees that a file has the same number of transactions, the same total and the same period as a file it already imported, it compares the transactions more loosely and sets aside the ones that match.

Re-reading a file

When Bokapsys reads a file again to find something it missed, for example after the balance check, everything it already imported from that file is recognised and only genuinely missed transactions are added.

What Bokapsys doesn’t treat as a duplicate

Being careful about duplicates also means not throwing away real transactions.

Two identical charges on the same day. If you really bought two $4.50 coffees on the same day, and both are on the statement, both are kept. Bokapsys counts how many times a transaction appears, not just whether it appears.
The same charge on two different accounts. Duplicates are checked per bank account. If your checking and savings accounts are each charged the same $5 fee on the same day, those are two real fees and both are kept. This is one reason to choose the right Bank account when you upload.
Recurring payments. A subscription that charges the same amount each month is not a duplicate. Each month’s payment has its own date.

Bokapsys decides, so you don’t have to wait

Bokapsys knows exactly what is already in your books, so it makes the duplicate decision itself rather than asking you about every overlap. A file with overlapping transactions still finishes and reaches Completed like any other. Your new transactions are never held up waiting for a decision about old ones.

When a file asks for a decision

Occasionally a file does stop at Review needed with a Resolve button, headed Possible duplicates need your decision. This happens when Bokapsys isn’t sure.

Click Resolve on the file’s card on Mapping Statements.
Read the list. Each transaction is shown next to the statement already in your books that it looks like, with that statement’s date, amount and the file it came from. If the whole file looks like a copy of one you already imported, a warning names that file.
Tick the transactions that really are new, and untick the ones that are copies.
Click Import selected to add the ticked transactions, or Discard selected to drop them.

The transactions from that file that weren’t in question are already imported. Only the ones in the list are waiting.

If you find a duplicate anyway

If a duplicate does get into your books, for example from typing in the same transaction by hand, remove it on View Statements. Select the row and delete it. If it was already reconciled, undo that reconciliation first.