How do you import credit card transactions into ParishSOFT Accounting?

What are the options for getting card transactions into ParishSOFT Accounting?

ParishSOFT Accounting publishes no public API, so there is no card feed or programmatic sync for a third-party platform to connect. Card activity reaches the books either keyed in manually or brought in as a file through the system's import function. For a parish, school, or diocesan office with staff cards in circulation, the file route is the one that scales — if someone prepares the file correctly.

What does the manual workflow look like for a parish bookkeeper?

Without automation, each month: download the card statement, collect receipts from clergy, staff, and volunteers, match each line, assign the fund and account for every transaction — restricted versus unrestricted matters here — reshape the spreadsheet into an importable layout, and run the import. Every retyped line risks a miscoded fund, and miscoded funds surface later as restricted-balance corrections at audit or diocesan review.

How does Vergo automate the import?

Vergo removes the preparation and leaves the bookkeeper a review-and-load step:

1. Spend happens on Vergo cards. Vergo issues cards to the staff who purchase, so every transaction is captured the moment it occurs.

2. Coding happens at the point of spend. Cardholders snap the receipt and code the purchase from their phone; the bookkeeper sets rules so recurring vendors code themselves — with the fund and account on each line.

3. Vergo generates the import file. Vergo produces a custom-built CSV export matched to the import format ParishSOFT Accounting expects, so it loads without column-mapping or cleanup.

4. The bookkeeper imports and reviews. The file runs through ParishSOFT Accounting's own import routine, reviewed before loading, so nothing posts unseen.

Why does a matched export matter for fund accounting?

Because generic exports leave the riskiest work — fund distribution — for month-end, when context is gone. A statement line three weeks old gives no hint whether the hardware-store run was facilities or a ministry event. Vergo captures that answer when the purchase happens, from the person who made it. And because the export is built against the structure ParishSOFT Accounting imports, the monthly cycle collapses to two steps: export from Vergo, import into ParishSOFT Accounting — with funds already right.

The review step adds a control the manual scramble never had: the bookkeeper sees every line before it loads, so nothing posts unseen. And because spend is visible in Vergo the day it happens, the parish office stops discovering budget surprises at statement time and starts catching them week by week — while the cardholder still remembers the purchase and the answer takes a text message, not a treasure hunt.