Learn how to connect your bank account to QuickBooks Online or upload transaction files like CSV and Excel. The presenter shows how to map columns and set your import date to avoid balance mismatches that break reconciliation.
Once you log into QuickBooks, your screen should look something like this. I am going to be walking you through this in Accountant's View, and if your screen looks a little different, it might be because you're in Business View. So to switch to Accountant's View, you'll go to this gear icon here, and then down here it would say Switch to Accountant's View, and you'll want to click that. A few other things from this same gear icon, you can go here to update your account, change the email address associated with it, add your tax ID, and change some more specific settings. And then here is Manage Users. This is where you'll be able to invite other people to access your QuickBooks, such as an accountant or an employee, without having to give them your login. The first thing we're going to do is link our bank accounts to QuickBooks. So what you'll want to do is go to Transactions here at the left, or it might say Banking depending on your QuickBooks subscription. And then I'm going to go to Bank Transactions. Now I already have accounts linked, but if we wanted to link accounts for the first time, what we would do is go to Link Account right here. QuickBooks works with pretty much every major bank and most small banks. So what you'll do is search for your bank here, or if you see it here, you can select it. And then once I click Continue, a window is going to pop up where I can actually log in to the bank. Once you've entered your credentials in this screen, there will be a couple more screens that— where QuickBooks is asking you to give permissions for QuickBooks to access the data. Keep in mind that this is very secure. It's read-only access, so QuickBooks will receive information from the bank but of course can't send any information or initiate transactions. So once you've done that, you'll click Continue, and it's important to remember that before you actually import the data, QuickBooks is going to ask you what date you want those transactions to start importing. So for example, if you're catching up your bookkeeping from the beginning of the year, you'll want to select January 1st. If there's a different date range, then you'll enter whatever that date is. Another way to get your bank data into QuickBooks would be to upload the data from a file. So when you log into your bank, you'll probably have options to download your data. The easiest way of course, is just to connect directly like I just showed you, but you can also download a QBO or QuickBooks file or a CSV or Excel file. In this case, we're going to import an Excel file because I have downloaded and doctored some of the data for the purpose of sharing in this video. So what we're going to do is go to Link Account, Upload from File, And now we can just drag and drop our files right here. Here I'm going to select the account that that Excel file should be linked to. And if you do import an Excel file, you'll want to open it beforehand so that you can answer these questions. In some cases, you'll have 2 columns that show the amounts. In this case, I only have one, and then you'll want to import all of the transactions in that date range. Okay, I'm going to do the same thing for my savings account. I'm going to select this savings account and hit continue. Continue again, select all of the transactions. If we don't import them all, it will cause our balance to be off and we won't be able to reconcile the account. I'll select yes to import those transactions now, and now we have everything there.
