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 To Review on the Banking page. Nothing hits your books until you post it, so this is your review queue.
To categorize them, you can:
- Ask the agent in chat to categorize and post your To Review transactions, or select rows and choose Add to chat
- Right-click a transaction (or a selection) and choose Suggest to fill in a category and payee, then post
- Pick the category and payee yourself, or 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.