Getting Started with switchbooks

Welcome to switchbooks. This tutorial walks through your first week: connecting accounts, reviewing transactions, and letting the agent take work off your plate.

1. Connect your bank accounts

Head to the Banking page and click Connect account. switchbooks uses Plaid to link checking accounts, savings accounts, and credit cards. Once connected, your recent transactions import automatically and stay in sync going forward.

If you have accounts at multiple banks, connect them all. Your books are only as complete as the accounts feeding them.

2. Review your pending transactions

Imported transactions land in the pending table on the Banking page. Nothing hits your books until you post it, so this is your review queue.

For each transaction, switchbooks suggests a category and payee. You can:

• Accept the suggestion and post the transaction as-is
• Change the category or payee before posting
• Select a batch of similar transactions and post them together

Post a handful by hand during your first session. The agent learns from how you categorize, and its suggestions get sharper quickly.

3. Set up rules for recurring activity

When you notice the same vendor showing up repeatedly, right-click the transaction and choose Create Rule. Rules automatically apply a category and payee to matching transactions as they import, so recurring charges like software subscriptions or rent stop needing your attention at all.

4. Ask the agent

The chat panel is the fastest way to get things done. A few things you can ask it to do:

• "Categorize all my pending transactions"
• "Create a payee for Acme Supplies and apply it to matching transactions"
• "Show me my profit and loss for last month"
• "Which categories did I spend the most on this quarter?"

The agent works with your real data and can make the changes for you, not just tell you how.

5. Check your reports

Once your first transactions are posted, open the Reports section. Your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow statements update in real time as you post. If a number looks off, click into it to see the underlying transactions.

What to do next

By the end of your first week, aim for: all accounts connected, the pending queue at zero, and rules covering your most common vendors. From there, bookkeeping becomes a few minutes of review instead of hours of data entry.

Have a question this tutorial didn't cover? Ask it in the community and I'll answer it publicly.