The process of reviewing your transactions is crucial in maintaining an accurate bank feed and helps you stay on top of your books. With Clio Accounting, you can set up rule-based automations to limit unnecessary and repetitive actions during your regular accounting upkeep, saving you time and reducing errors. If your firm uses Clio Payments, you can allow Clio Accounting to automatically transactions made via Clio Payments to your bank feed, which also helps you minimize time and effort for regular accounting upkeep.
Create accounting automation rules
In Clio Accounting, you can create rules where if a transaction meets certain conditions a particular set of actions are triggered. The actions help you with the process of categorizing and matching transactions by using the additional information you provide for these rules to reduce the number of transactions that are “unrecognized”.
- In Clio Accounting, go to the main Banking tab.
- Click Accounting automation.
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Click Create rule.
Note: You can also access the panel to create a rule while you are categorizing and matching transactions. Once you click Review transactions for a banking account to start the review process, you can click Create rule without exiting the review process.
- Provide a Rule name.
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Set the triggers for the rule (the “When”).
- Choose whether this rule applies to transactions for Funds in, Funds out, or for both.
- Select which bank account(s) this rule applies to by clicking Select bank accounts and choosing the relevant account(s).
- For the And include field, select if the rule must be triggered when all the conditions are (All of the following—an “AND” condition) or whether just one condition must be met (Any of the following—an “OR” condition).
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Set your conditions.
- Choose which information to test: Description, Raw bank memo, or Amount.
- For Description and Raw bank memo, choose if the above field should contain, should not contain, or exactly match a value or criteria of your choosing (set as per the next instruction below). For Amount, choose if the field should equal, not equal, or is greater or smaller than the value or criteria of your choosing (set as per the next instruction below).
- In the blank field, provide the value or criteria to test your field against.
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Set the automated actions (the “Then”) when the criteria for the rule
is
met
Note: The information provided here will be automatically applied to transactions that meet the conditions set previously. When you later review your transactions, the information helps to match transactions added into Clio Accounting and Clio Manage to those that appear in your actual bank accounts. Learn more about the process of categorizing and matching transactions.
- For Category, select the relevant ledger account for the transaction. Learn the basics of different ledgers here.
- Optional: For Vendor, select the relevant vendor. You will have to add the vendor in Clio Accounting before you can select if from this list. Learn more about adding vendors to Clio Accounting.
- Optional: Add a memo. Select the Append to an existing memo if you do not want the original memo to be overwritten.
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Set how to apply the rule by using the
Automatically confirm transactions checkbox.
- When unchecked, a transaction that triggers the rule will continue to appear in your list of transactions for when you review your transactions. The transaction will have a status of Rule applied and you can confirm the match (if it applies) or open the transaction to choose Other actions and appropriate categorize and match the transaction.
- When checked, a transaction that triggers this rule will automatically be confirmed. You can still review how the rule-based automation handled the transactions by viewing the Reviewed subtab when you review your transactions.
- Click Save changes.
Example
Imagine you have a recurring monthly bill of $652.00 from a vendor who is managing your office printing and supplies needs at a fixed amount per month. The payment to the vendors occurs via Direct Debit from your operating account called “Operating Account One”. The line item in your bank account always contains “BESTPRINT” in reference to the name of the vendor. The amount of $652 is a total value for two individual line items. The first is an amount of $235 for Equipment Lease/Rental Expense of the office printer supplied by the company. The second is an amount of $ 417 for Consumables/Office Supplies. Because the two amounts are entered to two different ledgers, these ledger amounts are never matched to the single amount debited from the operating account. In order to streamline your accounting procedures, You can create two rules and set your parameters as follows:
Rule 1
- Rule name: Office equipment printer lease
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When:
- The transaction is: Choose Funds out.
- Select bank accounts: Check the box for “Operating Account One”.
- And include: Choose All of the following. This is to ensure that both conditions that we set must be met in order to match the bank feed transaction to the transaction added into Clio Accounting.
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Add condition #1:
- Choose Description and Contains and type the criteria value (blank field) as BESTPRINT.
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Add condition #2:
- Choose Amount and Equals and type the criteria value (blank field) as 235.
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Then:
- Category: Equipment Lease/Rental Expense
- Vendor: Best in West Office Supplies (BESTPRINT)
- Automatically confirm transactions: Check this box to ensure that the matching occurs without you needing to manually confirm it. You can allow this transaction to occur completely automatically because the stringent conditions that you selected will not apply to any other transaction that is not for this vendor and for exactly for $235.
Rule 2
- Rule name: Printing and office supplies
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When:
- The transaction is: Choose Funds out.
- Select bank accounts: Check the box for “Operating Account One”.
- And include: Choose All of the following. This is to ensure that both conditions that we set must be met in order to match the bank feed transaction to the transaction added into Clio Accounting.
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Add condition #1:
- Choose Description and Contains and type the criteria value (blank field) as BESTPRINT.
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Add condition #2:
- Choose Amount and Equals and type the criteria value (blank field) as 417.
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Then:
- Category: Office Supplies
- Vendor: Best in West Office Supplies (BESTPRINT)
- Automatically confirm transactions: Check this box to ensure that the matching occurs without you needing to manually confirm it. You can allow this transaction to occur completely automatically because the stringent conditions that you selected will not apply to any other transaction that is not for this vendor and for exactly for $417.
Manage accounting automation rules
- In Clio Accounting, go to the main Banking tab.
- Click Accounting automation
This table shows a list of all the rules that you created including the rule’s priority, name, bank account(s) that it applies to, the trigger condition, actions that occur when the rule runs, whether the rule runs entirely without intervention or if final confirmation is required (Auto-confirm), and whether the rule is active.
- In Clio Accounting, go to the main Banking tab.
- Click Accounting automation.
- For the rule you want to modify, click Edit.
- Make your changes. Refer to Create accounting automation rules for information about the different fields and what they mean.
- Click Save changes.
You can also edit a rule that applied to a particular transaction while you are reviewing the transactions. Click on the Rule applied status to open the panel to edit the automation rule. This is also useful to see which rule was triggered for this transaction. Once you have made your changes to the rule, click Save changes to confirm.
- In Clio Accounting, go to the main Banking tab.
- Click Accounting automation.
- For the rule you want to modify, click the ellipses in the Actions column, then select Make inactive.
- In Clio Accounting, go to the main Banking tab.
- Click Accounting automation.
- For the rule you want to modify, click the ellipses in the Actions column, then select Delete.
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Click Delete again to confirm the rule deletion.
Important: Any transactions that triggered the rule will revert back to the state before the rule was applied. This is an appropriate option if you realize a rule you created is not behaving as expected. If the rule correctly applied to and ran for previous transactions, but financial details have changed recently, you can either edit the rule, or inactivate it (to leave previous automated events intact) and create a new rule.
You can assign priorities to your different rules so that if a transaction meets the conditions of more than one rule, you can decide which rule should be run.
- In Clio Accounting, go to the main Banking tab.
- Click Accounting automation.
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Use the up and down arrows, to reorganize the priority of the rules.
Note: Any rules that are inactivated will appear at the bottom of the list of rules, but will internally maintain their priority position. New rules will be assigned the lowest priority position.
Auto-match Clio Payments to your bank feed
If your firm uses Clio Payments, client payments made via Clio Payments are recorded in Clio Manage and automatically synced to Clio Accounting. An accounting automation can then review this particular subset of transactions and match them to the correct transactions in your bank feed, thereby reducing the number of transactions you have to review (categorize and match) yourself. You can also easily maintain visibility on how this automation handles transactions during your regular transaction reviews via the Reviewed subtab where each of these transactions will have an Auto-matched status. Refer to Review (categorize and match) transactions in bank accounts and Review accounting automations for more details.
This automation is enabled by default for all users. To disable this feature:
- In Clio Accounting, go to the main Banking tab.
- Click Accounting automation.
- In the Auto-match Clio Payments deposits card, toggle the switch to on.
To re-enable this feature:
- In Clio Accounting, go to the main Banking tab.
- Click Accounting automation.
- In the Auto-match Clio Payments deposits is off card, toggle the switch to on.