MT940

What is an MT940 file?

You can still receive an overview of the transactions on a bank account on paper, but this is becoming more and more the exception. To process this income and expenditure smoothly in, for example, accounting software, the information can be supplied in the form of a so-called MT940 file. This allows easy and fast digital processing.

An MT940 file contains electronic bank data with extensive information about incoming and outgoing transactions on one or more bank accounts. It is a file format intended for exporting financial transactions, in fact the decoded digital representation of the paper account statements and their attachments - albeit with much more detailed information.

In that sense, it is comparable to a CODA file, but that is only used for Belgian bank accounts. MT940 is broader in scope and therefore more widely accepted. Banks usually give customers the option of exporting transactions as an MT940 file in the online banking environment. How this is done varies from bank to bank.

When the accountant imports an MT940 file into his accounting software, all transactions of the bank account end up where they belong in one go, with the additional explanatory information. Each transaction carries its own identification taken from the MT940 file.

Uploading MT940 files in onFact

If you don't use an automatic bank integration in onFact, you can still upload the bank information manually via MT940 files for further processing. onFact reads the various transactions and places them in a list, with which sales invoices or purchases can be linked and matched.