Your clients' bank statements, booked in Miracle without the typing.

1What it does

A client's statement arrives as a PDF. Forty lines, or four hundred. Each one has to end up in Miracle against the right ledger: the supplier, the loan, the cash book, the client's other bank account. Someone types it in, one line at a time, and someone else checks it.

Ledger Map is a Windows desktop app for accountants and CA firms in India who keep clients' books in Miracle. It takes the PDF, reads every line, and tells you which ledger each line belongs to. You confirm the ones it is sure of with one key. You type the few it does not know. Then you export, and the entries are ready to import into Miracle.

Ledger Map is made by Infocado and Perfect Consultancy LLP. It is built as a set of desks. Statement Desk, which this page describes, is available now. Three more desks are coming; they are in section 7.

2From PDF to entries

An import runs through eight steps. The bar at the top of the screen shows where you are. You can go back to any step before you export.

1. Upload. Drop or choose up to ten bank statement PDFs, from any bank. Two are read at a time.
2. Bank ledgers. Each PDF is shown beside the party's bank ledgers. The file name may suggest one; you confirm with Enter. Monthly statements can share one bank ledger, and an entry printed in two of them comes in once.
3. In Miracle. Every entry is looked up in that bank's ledger in the client's Miracle books, read on your own PC. Entries Miracle already has are left out, so nothing is booked twice.
4. Contra entries. Transfers between the client's own banks are paired by themselves. Possible pairs and split transfers are offered for you to accept or reject.
5. Suggestions. Any clue gives a suggested ledger with a confidence mark. Accept with Enter, or accept all and move on.
6. Suspense. Only entries nothing is known about wait here. Type a ledger, or leave them in the suspense ledger.
7. Review. Every entry, grouped by ledger, to check before export.
8. Export. Entries ready for Miracle. Ledger Map never writes to Miracle files itself.

Contra pairs are found by the same UTR or RRN reference on both banks, an equal amount or a small bank fee between them, and a date within three days. A split transfer, where one entry on one bank is two on the other, is offered too.

3How it knows the ledger

Most of what Ledger Map knows, it learnt from you. A UPI ID, an account or phone number, or a narration pattern that you mapped once is matched the next time on its own. When a ledger's full name is written inside the narration, it is found there. Cash withdrawals, an ATM line or a cheque to SELF, go to the cash ledger.

Cheques are a special case. The cheque number is ignored, so one choice covers the payee's other cheques. And when the same narration comes with different amounts, the amount decides: two loan EMIs from one lender stay two ledgers.

It also reads earlier postings in the client's Miracle books, on your PC, and suggests ledgers for repeat payments: the same amount, on the same day, month after month.

Two rules hold throughout. Ledger Map never changes a choice you made. And across imports it learns only from choices you exported, so a guess you did not keep teaches it nothing.

4Reading the PDFs

Ledger Map reads text-based bank statement PDFs from any bank. Every running balance is checked against the rows above it. A statement whose balances do not all add up is still imported, but its rows to check are marked in amber on the PDF, one at a time, so you can see what the bank printed.

When a statement layout is new, AI learns a reusable reading recipe for it, so the next statement from that bank reads at once. Only the statement's extracted text is sent, never the PDF or its password.

Password-protected PDFs open once you type the password. It is remembered for that party, so later PDFs open without asking, and the unlocked copy keeps its text selectable. Scanned PDFs, which are pictures of pages, are not supported yet.

5Built for the keyboard

Every action works without a mouse. Enter accepts the suggestion under the cursor. Ctrl+Enter accepts it now and moves on. Slash opens search. The keys you will use most are below; Ctrl+K or ? shows them all inside the app.

Parties open in tabs, like a browser: one client per tab, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W and Ctrl+Tab. Tabs and the work in them survive a restart. Each party works in one financial year that you pick. Search everywhere ranks whole words and name starts first, so typing ram finds Ramesh Traders before anything that merely contains those letters.

6Safe with client data

The client's Miracle company folder is read on your PC, and only read. Ledger Map never writes to Miracle files. It never uploads company files or company details; the server receives only the list of ledgers, so that it can match names.

The app runs only on PCs the administrator approves, so a client's books cannot be opened from an unknown machine. It updates itself: signed updates are downloaded in the background and used after a restart.

There is also a Validator, under More tools. It checks a party's bank statements against Miracle and lists the entries Miracle is missing or has twice, so the books can be corrected before the year closes.