Annual accounts
Import historical accounts
Bulk import annual accounts you have already filed, so prior year figures are on file for comparison, and what the import quietly skips.
The historical import is for accounts that are already done. You upload the annual accounts your firm has filed in previous years, and Spyral files them against the right company and financial year, so last year's figures are available when you work on this year.
It does not start cycles, produce resolutions or file anything.
Where to start
Open the company, go to the Finance tab, and on the Fiscal-Year Chain card choose Import Historical Accounts. The page is titled the same.
You can also reach it from a Historical row in the Workflow Timeline, using View.
The five steps
The wizard runs Select Group, Upload, Processing, Review, Commit.
1. Select Group
Everything you upload in one run is kept under a single client group, so relationships between the companies in that group are picked up afterwards. Choose an existing group or use Create New Group.
If your team has never had a group, one called Default Group was created for you on your first RCS import. See Client groups and suggested relationships.
2. Upload
Drag in PDF bundles or eCDF XML files. ZIP files are accepted too.
The limits are:
- at most 200 files in one run
- at most 25 MB per file
- at most 500 MB in total
Files upload straight from your browser. Once they are up, processing starts and you can carry on working elsewhere in Spyral.
3. Processing
Spyral reads each document, matches it to the right company, and checks the figures against what is already on file. A counter shows how many of the total have been processed, alongside four running totals: Matched automatically, New entities, Needs review and Failed.
A document is matched automatically when its RCS number matches a company you already have. When there is no match, Spyral decides between creating a new company and asking you, based on how confidently it read the document. A document with no RCS number, no company name, or that was scanned rather than produced digitally, is more likely to come to you.
If processing appears to stall, leave it. A document stuck being read is timed out and marked as failed automatically within an hour, and the job then moves itself on to the review step.
Do not re-upload the same files. You will end up working through the same documents twice.
4. Review
Two tables: Needs your attention and Ready to add. Work through the first one.
Opening a document shows a preview beside the fields Spyral read, all of which you can correct:
- Mapped Entity, including (Create New Entity) if it belongs to a company you do not have yet
- RCS Number and Company Name
- Fiscal Year Start and Fiscal Year End
- Document Type, one of Balance Sheet, P&L, Notes, Management Report, Auditor Report, Full Bundle or Other
Choose Save when it is right, or Skip this document to leave it out of the import altogether.
The statuses you will see against each document are:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Being read | Still processing. |
| Matched to an entity | Matched to a company you already have. |
| New entity | No match, but read confidently enough to create the company on commit. |
| Needs your attention | No match, and not read confidently enough to guess. |
| Sorted out | You corrected it, or it has been added. |
| Could not be read | The document failed to parse, or timed out. |
5. Commit
The last step lists what will happen: the company, the financial year, whether it is a Create Entity or an Attach to Existing, and the document type. The button reads Add N documents, where N is the number being added.
What the commit quietly skips
This is the part that surprises people. The number of documents added can be lower than the number you confirmed, and nothing draws attention to the gap.
A document is skipped silently when the same company already has a document of the same type for the same financial year. No error, no warning, no line in the result.
Two documents are also skipped without comment: one where nothing usable was read, and one where no company could be resolved.
If your total looks short, this is almost always why. Re-running the import will not help, because the duplicate is skipped again. Check the company's documents to confirm the year is already covered.
When a document disagrees with what is on file
If an imported document says something different from the company record, Spyral shows both the stored value and the value it read, side by side, so you can see the difference before committing.
Committing overwrites the company's registered office, share capital and legal form with what the document says, wherever the document has a value. Look at the comparison before you commit, rather than after.
The job stays open until everything is handled
The import is only closed once nothing is left needing attention, failed, or still being read. If anything remains, the job stays in review so you can come back to it.
This is deliberate. It means a partial commit does not strand the documents you have not dealt with yet.
What happens afterwards
Once documents are committed, Spyral looks across the group for relationships they imply: shareholdings, parent companies, people serving on more than one board, and other tracked companies mentioned in the documents. Anything it finds is offered as a suggestion for you to accept or dismiss.
See Client groups and suggested relationships.
Imported years appear in the company's fiscal year chain as Historical. They have no cycle attached and no deadline, because the accounts were already filed.
Download the filing package and file
Download the signed board and shareholder resolutions as one package, and understand what Ready for LBR does and does not mean.
Client groups and suggested relationships
Group related client companies together, and review the ownership, management and counterparty relationships Spyral infers from their documents.