In this tutorial, the speaker introduces QuickBooks Online’s relatively new Auto Pairing feature, explaining why it was created—to prevent duplicate transactions that arise when bookkeepers manually break down credit‑card statements without recognizing the linked credit‑card feed. The feature automatically matches payroll, merchant services, and other recurring transactions, leveraging AI Assist to speed up bookkeeping. The speaker emphasizes that auto‑rules and bank rules can be powerful if applied thoughtfully, offering examples such as avoiding generic Amazon rules while safely automating Staples or utility bills. He then walks through the exact steps to locate the Auto Pairing toggle in the QBO interface (Transactions → Bank Transactions → Categorized, then the gear icon) and demonstrates turning the feature off to correct mis‑pairings, then re‑enabling it. Throughout, he stresses the need for precision, awareness of client‑side rule changes, and the ability to manually intervene when auto‑pairing misbehaves. The video concludes with a screen share showing the UI and a reminder that users retain full control over the feature.
Chapters
This week we're going to talk about the Intuit feature that's fairly new. You're probably gonna see it pop up repeatedly on every client's screen about the auto pairing. So it's a relatively new feature. You may have encountered it where it didn't work so well and you couldn't figure out how to shut it off. You delete the transaction, it goes right back in the bank feed, goes right back in auto pairs, ends up backwards. You don't want it to go. So this could happen with auto pairing is, was created because a major pain point for the bookkeepers was the client would maybe jump in, or the bookkeeper wasn't educated enough to jump in and say, let's just say it's a credit card payment. So the bookkeeper would see the credit card transaction come in. So Chase, you're paying Chase credit card, and they would take their Chase statement and go in and break down the whole bill line item by line item, not realizing that the credit card's connected. And they would break it down and show it against the operating account and then all the, all the expenses. Then they would see it come into the bank account on the credit card side. They'd see it in the credit card bank feed and they go, oh, that was paid by the operating, and they'd hit operating account as the pay— payment coming from and hitting the credit card. Now you've got two transactions doing the exact same thing, and you've got duplication because you've got a transaction showing the same expenses that was on the, on the credit card bank feed. We don't want that. So that was partially one of the reasons why they went forward with this auto pairing. They're trying to help us with bank feeds and bank rules. This is part of that forward-thinking AI technology that we're going to be seeing, the AI Assist coming into the QuickBooks as well. So auto pairing is a, is a feature that is turned on in your system. I'll show you how to access it. It's very, very easy to access. And one of the things it's doing is it's helping us automatically match payroll transactions if you use QuickBooks Online Payroll and also Merchant Services. So if you're using Merchant Services at your firm or your client's using them at their firm to automatically send out the payments and then QuickBooks is the merchant provider, it's automatically matching those so we don't have to do it. So that really speeds up a lot of time when you are using their systems baked in and it's matching because it's, it knows the transactions are accurate. So it's trying to speed up the process. I know there's a lot of bookkeepers and accountants out there that will argue with me till they're blue in the face about whether or not you should use an auto rule. I think you should be able to use auto rules. You just use them in a smart way. So you can use bank rules. Absolutely should be using bank rules. You can use bank rules just to attach the payee to a transaction. So, for example, Amazon, if you don't want to use a specific account, you can actually connect the vendor name so that the vendor name populates and then you have to go through and figure out what the category is. So that's a way of using bank rules to quicken up the process. You want to have payee names listed. That is a place that I find clients just bypass if they're jumping in and doing their bank rules on the weekend for you. And then you come in, you're like, what's going on? Why don't I have any transaction? And you find out that the client was working in their file over the weekend and they just, just couldn't leave it alone and had to help. That's how some of the bad auto-pairing happens too, because they might just allow or see something and say, oh, it's auto-paired, that's great. But with the bank rules in particular, using the auto-rule can be a good and a bad thing. You just have to make sure you're very precise with it. For example, you don't want to make an auto-rule for— you don't want to make an auto-rule for Amazon because you know it could be many things. It could be small equipment, it could be furniture, it can be— Furniture. Food, who knows, it could be many things. So you don't want to make that connection with Amazon. But with Staples, you know, it's office supplies. So you can put office supplies. That also could be office equipment, but you know what I mean. If it's an electric bill, you could put the electric bill there. So you have the ability to select what goes in. And there's some transactions that repeatedly come in every month. They go to the same category. Why not auto-rule it and get it off the screen? It happens behind the scenes. You never see it clutter up that banking transaction screen, and it's a huge time saver. Even if you're using an outsourced company, why not bulk up the auto rules because you're paying them? So it's a way to set up a system that works more efficiently. You just have to be very careful in how you implement those rules. That's probably my best advice. Now back to the auto pairing. So if you've ever had an auto pair that paired incorrectly, say somebody gets the same net pay and it's the wrong one attached to it for whatever reason. The system's not perfect, as we know, it's not perfect. You want to stop it. How do you stop it? Well, very simply, you're gonna go into the banking area, the transactions, you're gonna click on Categorized or Excluded, and there's a little gear on the right-hand side. You're gonna click that gear, and then at that gear you're going to pull in and turn off. There's a little toggle button, and I'm gonna show you in a second. You just toggle it off, and then that way it doesn't show. Mm-hmm. And it will not do the auto pairing. You're gonna send it the transaction back, pair it properly, then you can go back in the settings and put it back on. It's very simple, but you might not know where this is, which is the purpose of this video. So I'm hoping this will be really helpful. So let me share my screen. I'm gonna show you exactly what an auto pair transaction looks like in the system, and then also how to get into the system and remove that auto pairing feature so that you're able to pair up the right transaction. This can happen with Clio and anything, LeanLaw, things that have journal entries and the system's gonna wanna pair it. And sometimes you just don't want it to pair to the one that they want it to pair to. So this is gonna be important to help you with that. I'm gonna share my screen and show you how. So as you can see here on this, this screen, I just got here by going to Transactions, Bank Transactions, Categorized, and then I can come over here and turn that automatic matching on and off. So you can see here's a payment to my credit card for the business and it automatically added it. Auto-add. You can see that it's in an auto-add for PayPal. These are things maybe I have set up, UnitedHealth. So I have— this actually set itself up with an auto-pairing and it paired my Bank of America payment to the credit card payment. So it knew that it was that transaction. But say this was wrong, I can just come over and toggle this button off. So this is under the gear here under Categorized or Excluded. It's not under For Review. And you can toggle it off. It will no longer match auto, auto-pair, auto-match any of the bank rule. where you can turn it back on. So it is that easy and quick. But I wanted to at least show you that this is a simple process to turn it on and off. But I want you to know that you still have the power to do so. So hope this was helpful, and we'll see you all next week. Bye now.
