Talo Guide
Clean up a messy export and find a duplicate charge
How to ask Talo to clean a CSV with repeated headers and a decimal separator that keeps changing, and find the one real duplicate charge among several that only look like it.
About the screenshots in this guide
Every screenshot in this English guide is a real capture of Talo, currently shown with the Spanish interface (the English interface is on its way). Menus, buttons and labels in the pictures are in Spanish; the surrounding text describes what each one does in English.
A charges or transactions export built by pasting several monthly exports together usually arrives messy: the header row repeats several times, the decimal separator changes from one part of the file to another, and the same client can show up with their email in uppercase in one row and lowercase in another. Inside that noise, there's sometimes a real duplicate charge hiding among several coincidences that look like one and aren't. Talo cleans the file and explains every decision it makes.
Steps
- Put the CSV (or Excel) in the project exactly as you exported it, without fixing it yourself first. The messier it is, the more it's worth asking Talo to do this.
- Ask something like "clean this file and explain, row by row where it matters, what decision you made and why": repeated headers to remove, a decimal separator to unify, the same client with their email written two different ways.
- If you suspect there are duplicate charges, say so explicitly and ask it to tell the real ones apart from the coincidences: "several rows look like duplicates because they share the same amount, the same client, or the same date, but most of them are different, legitimate charges; find the one that's truly the same charge repeated." A real duplicate shares client, amount, date and invoice reference all at once; matching on just one of those isn't enough.
- Ask for the result as a new file, not as a replacement of the original: "save the clean version as a new file, don't touch the original." That way you always keep the export exactly as it arrived.
- Review Talo's explanations before treating the duplicate charge as confirmed: check that specific row yourself against the source system before asking for a refund or making an accounting adjustment.
Tip
If the project already had this file indexed in its memory before you cleaned it, ask Talo to check whether that automatic read handled the commas inside quoted names correctly (for example, "Company, S.L."). A misread separator can scramble entire columns without it being obvious at a glance.
This cleans and flags, it doesn't decide for you: you confirm the refund, the adjustment, or the claim for a duplicate charge, and if the amount matters, run it by whoever handles the books.