Master the Banking Download Feed and Save Time! (in QBO)

Hello everyone. Today we're going to look at the Banking Download interface and some of the features that are available. So first of all, the Banking download is the area where you connect your bank account, which you can link over here or your credit card account. And once you do that and once you enter your information, QuickBooks will automatically, automatically download the transactions on a daily basis. This can be a huge time saver. It means that you don't have to manually enter the transactions, you simply have to allocate them once they have been downloaded. So there are lots of videos on how to allocate transactions, what they mean. Intuit has some and there's various other ones on YouTube that you can take a look at. And at some point I've will look at that as well. But for today I wanted to show you some of the other features and functions that are available in this interface that can really help you save time and streamline the process. So let's begin. The first one is the menu option are up here and you'll see that you have the bank transactions, which is the current interface that we're looking at. You have app transactions. If you have apps connected to your QuickBooks Online and there's hundreds of, if not thousands of apps that connect, some of them will appear here if they have anything to do with banking. The next one is receipts and this is a great feature in, in that you can upload your receipts.

From your computer or there's a way to do it on the mobile app as well. And QuickBooks will actually read. Use machine learning to read what's on the receipt and pull in the information over here. And once it does that, you can review it. And if everything looks good, good, you can allocate it and QuickBooks will include the receipt that you uploaded as an attachment.

Reconcile. This is one of the most important accounting functions. Everybody should reconcile their bank and credit card accounts at least monthly.

There are also various videos on YouTube that you can look at and I will cover this at a later date. Rules are a great time saver. You can set up rules to automatically allocate or categorize certain transactions and enter the information. And you can simply review them and then allocate them. You can create rules here or you can create rules directly when categorizing the bank transactions. And then finally you have the chart of Accounts. I have several videos on Chart of Accounts and this is where you would add a new account for categorization purposes. And similar to rules, you can also add them directly in the bank transactions tab.

So let's go back to the bank transactions and let's look at the next feature that's available.

So right here you'll see that you have two little cards with your.

Bank and your credit card. These are currently the accounts that I have connected for the Sherlock Holmes Detective Agency. You might have various bank accounts connected that actually will go across the page and onto the next page. There will be a little arrow here which you can click click to access all the accounts. Alternatively, you can click on this little drop down and see all of your accounts and reorder them any way you want. So it might make sense to have the accounts that you use more often at the front and the ones that you use less often at the back.

The next feature that I would like to point out are the filters that are here. So you can filter by date and you can also filter the type of transaction. So Money in, for example, will show you all of the deposits. If you want to view your information in a certain way and you want to allocate all your deposits at once, this can be useful. And to exit out of the filter, simply click on this little X.

You can also search for a description. And so for example, let's say I want to look at all of the WagePoint payments here. You'll see it'll show up and then I can potentially allocate them all at once. And we'll look at this shortly on how this can be very useful and help you save time. The next feature are these little icons here in the corner. And the icons you can print a list. If someone's old school they want to look at a printed list, you could give it to them to provide you with some details on transactions. For example, alternatively, you can export the list to Excel. Next is the Gear. And the Gear generally means that there's additional customization available. When you click on the Gear, you can see all the different types of customization that you can do to this interface. The bank download interface, for example, you can include a check number up here in the columns. This relates to columns P, you can have class and location. If this is something that you use in your business.

The grouping is quite interesting in that it groups transactions based on the column that is used to sort the transactions. So in this case it's the date. But if I clicked on Bank Detail, for example, it groups it by the detail available that has been downloaded. Similarly, you could do it by category or match, it'll group it as well. There's really all kinds of groupings that are available that can be very useful, especially when you have a lot of transactions and you want to enter your information.

You can add new suppliers and within the transaction details. So if you open this up and you look at the little gear section, you can add all of these.

Boxes into the transaction or remove them if you like as well. If you just want to show less information. One of the ones I'd like to highlight is the editable date field. So the transaction is downloaded obviously on the date that it goes through your bank, but there may be a reason that you might want the transaction to appear on an earlier date or a couple of days later, later for whatever reason, for accounting purposes. So you can actually toggle that and change the date of the transaction. And the final feature that is available here is the number of transactions that it will show you on the first page. So here you'll see I have 31 transactions. And on the credit card I have 418 transactions. So if I personally like to see all the transactions on one page, I don't like clicking over here and going to the next page. So by going to the Gear section, I can choose to have a maximum of 300 transactions appear on one page. Some of you might be different, you just might want 50. It's a little more manageable on one page. You do those, you move on to the next one.

The final thing that I would like to highlight, which is one of my favorite parts of this interface, and you will see that it is a huge time saver, is the ability to categorize multiple transactions at once. And the way that you do this is let's just close that. So let's group this by bank detail. First of all, you don't have to do this. You can just simply sort. And in fact, you know what, I'm just going to simply sort. So I'm going to turn off the grouping here. So now I've sorted by bank detail. And let's say we want to allocate these three expenses from Pluto. QuickBooks does not recognize what these are and has put it to uncategorized expense. You should never use uncategorized expense because it's uncategorized, unless it's an account that you use for your accountant that they will look at at a later date. So let us click.

When we click on one, you'll see this black box appears. And this black box basically allows you to enter several transactions, as many transactions as you want at once, as long as they all belong to the same supplier and are going to the same account. So this is extremely useful when you have a lot of transactions in your download, many of which are recurring. So you can check all three of them.

You can also, rather than tick these ones individually, you can hold the shift key on your keyboard and it will enter all the transactions between the first and the last transaction that are ticked. So now we have three transactions we're going to click on. We can accept them as is. We don't want to do that because we're going to uncategorized and that's not a category we like. So let's click on edit. The type of transaction in this case is an expense. The supplier is Pluto, which exists. But if it didn't exist, you could simply just add it from here.

Well, the account we're going to use is bank charges. We can enter the class location if you want to enter tags. The tax in this case, because it is a bank charge, is exempt. And you can refer to my video on exempt versus zero rated versus out of scope for more details on this. And the customer doesn't really apply. So this looks good to me. Make sure that the fields that you have to fill out are these top three fields as well as the tax field. Otherwise QuickBooks will not like it and it will not enter it. It will just give you a big error. So click on Apply and accept.

And then QuickBooks prompts you for a rule concerning this. So in this case we can say yes, use the same category, automatically confirm transactions. This applies to I would say no. I like to review my transactions before they get entered. If you do click yes to this, they will automatically be entered. You'll never see them. They will just go directly to the email account, which can cause errors. So I would turn this off. And then Pluto is the name of the payee. The tax is exempt and you can certainly create a rule. And then in the future it will appear as a rule in the transaction and then you can simply add it. Let's create that rule.

In addition to that feature we can accept. So let's say this Amex transaction is duplicated. If we click on it again, anytime you click on a transaction, the black bar will appear again. You can accept it as is. Again, this is a transfer to an uncategorized asset, so you should not accept it because it's uncategorized. You do need to categorize it. You can edit it as we discussed, or you can exclude it, which means it disappears from this interface. The issue with excluding a transaction is that it will throw off your bank reconciliation which is absolutely which you cannot have happen in your accounting system because the potential for error is seen significant. The only reason you would exclude a transaction is if it's been entered perhaps manually already or it has been duplicated. And sometimes the transactions that get downloaded are duplicated. You can simply click on exclude and the transaction goes away, but it doesn't go away permanently. And so the good news is if you go to your Exclude Excluded tab, you can actually see all your excluded transactions and you can undo them by simply clicking Undo.

And the final tab here is the Categorize tab, which shows you all the transactions that you have already entered. And you can also undo the transactions here, which can be really useful when you may have entered a batch of transactions in correct correctly and so it makes it easy to undo them.

So this is a fairly comprehensive review of the features available in the Banking Download tab, and the reason I point them out is so that you can work more effectively and efficiently with QuickBooks as the stuff becomes second nature to you. So I hope this was useful. Don't hesitate to let me know if you have any questions in the comments or if you would like another video or a follow up video. My name is Radhika Kanna. I run a business called Montreal Financial. There's lots of resources at montrealFinancial CA blog posts and articles and checklists. You can also sign up to my newsletter. Thanks for watching and I will see you next time.