General usage

General usage

Creating your project

• Run Platan, click on "New Project".
• Choose your country, and set the path to save your project. Selecting your country is important because the expense categorization rule are assigned to countries. Currently only a very limited set of are eveilable, and only for Germany.

Importing your bank statements

• Click on "Import" in the middle of the screen or "Import Bank Statements" in the toolbar. The import wizard will appear.
• Fill in your data.
• Click "Finish" when you are done.

Setting up the rules

If your country has some rules assigned, then you may have some of your statements categorized right after import. You can see a pie chart, where each pie slice represents a category. Clicking on a pie slice will open a table showing which expeses are currently in the given category. There is a special category, called "other". If you click on this, you can see the uncategorized expenses. You can set your own rules to categorize these, by right-clicking on an expense, and choose "Add rule".

Example

1. Lets say your land lord is called Herr Müller. Look for an expense in the "other" table where in the payee column stays "Herr Müller". Right-click on this cell, choose "Add rule", and select the rent category. Now all your expenses that was payed for your land lord, are moved to the rent category.
2. Lets say that your bank writes "BANKAUTOMAT" int the type collumn for each cash withdrawal you make. Right-click on the word "BANKAUTOMAT", choose "Add rule", and select the cash category. Now all your cash withdrawals, are moved to the cash category.

Set category manually

You can move a single statement into a category without creating a rule, by choosing "Set category" instead of "Add rule".