Statements & importing

A Statement is the document your bank or card issuer gives you — a PDF, CSV, or Excel file covering some date range. Importing is the act of turning that document into real Transactions in an account’s Ledger.

Statements come in two shapes, and finzu treats them differently on purpose:

• Row-balance statements print a balance on every single transaction row. Most bank accounts look like this. Because every row carries its own balance, finzu can check each row against the one before it — the statement verifies itself.
• Summary-balance statements — typical of credit cards — print only an opening and a closing balance for the whole statement, with no per-row balance. There’s nothing to check row-by-row, so finzu instead computes forward from the opening balance and confirms the math lands on the closing balance the statement declares.

Why the distinction matters

It’s the difference between checking your work as you go and checking it once at the end. Finzu uses whichever check the statement actually supports — it never pretends a summary-balance statement gave it row-level proof it doesn’t have.

Next: the single most important idea in finzu — reported balance vs running balance.