Sarah Prevost shows how to set up auto-rules in QuickBooks Online bank feeds to automatically categorize recurring transactions. She demonstrates assigning vendor names and expense accounts, then creating rules that distinguish between transaction types, like fuel versus food purchases at the same store, to keep your feed clean and reduce manual work.
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Artisani Bookkeeping. I wanted to do a little video on how I work in using the bank feeds in QuickBooks Online. It's a really useful tool, especially for my purposes. I have a lot of different clients and there's a lot of, a lot of accounts that come into the bank feeds that are almost similar, things that you know are exactly what they are, and you can use the auto rule to really help you. But it's important to fine-tune it to the point where you give everybody a vendor name. So let's go into an account here that I have. And I'm going to come up to this first one. It's SunPass, and it's travel expense. But SunPass is a— it's kind of a thing that we have here in Florida where you can travel through the tolls and kind of take that shortcut of not being charged. It charges you as you go through. So I don't have the vendor here. This is a new client and they don't have the vendor, so I'm just going to copy the name that came in under the coding in the description. So I want to copy that name even though it's in the coding. I want to show that as my vendor. So I just copied the description from the bank and I'm going to right-click and I'm going to paste it. I'm going to add it in as a vendor. So now they have a vendor called SunPass. And then it is travel, but I want to make this an auto expense because I don't want to have to enter all these in because she travels quite a bit for her business. So I'm going to come over here. I'm just going to drop down to Uncategorized for a moment. And then come back up to travel again. So by changing the account, now I've got this little thing that shows up says we'll set it to travel all the time. Now I want to hit edit, create a custom rule, and then I'm going to right-click and add SunPass again and it's there and I just want to click automatically put it in my books. I'm going to hit save and as you'll see magically anytime she uses SunPass or, you know, goes through the tolls, which is quite often, So as you'll see, SunPass, all of them have been entered. So anything that was called SunPass is now entered. So here's another one, sunbiz.org. That's a filing fee for your business here in Florida. We have a really great state that I live in here now. Everything's so automated and it's so simple to do, to file your filing fee. So again, I copied the sunbiz.org because this particular client's a brand new file. So we're recreating 2017. That's why there's so many transactions. So I'm going to add this in as a vendor because it's brand new. I want to make sure that she gets all these vendor names in. It's important for your reports, so as you start to build reports, you've got these vendors. It also helps you to fine-tune these rules. And so this is actually a filing fee, and I like to make a filing fee expense account, so I'm going to add that here. Office General, Filing Fee, Save and Close. So now that's in here. This happens every year, so what the heck, I might as well make it an auto rule. So I'm going to hit Edit That Setting. And that populated automatically because that was just not an account that— it didn't select the correct account. So once you do that, it doesn't. And I'm going to automatically add it to my rules. So it's setting it and forgetting it. As that transaction comes in via the bank feed year after year, it's going to automatically go into the books. I will not see it on this bank feed holding screen. It's going to be right into the books to the right account with the right vendor. So it saves a lot of time when you're entering these transactions into the books. Now I don't have to see them populate on the bank feed screen, so it saves me time when I log into all my different clients and add the transactions in from the bank feed screen. It takes out the minutiae, the ones that happen all the time and you know exactly what vendor they go to. So like Verizon Wireless, for example, would go into telephone expense and transactions like that. So now you may have maybe a 7-Eleven where The client might go in and buy something to eat when they're traveling, or they may purchase fuel. So then you want to fine-tune the rule a little bit more than that to, you know, give it maybe a more than amount would be fuel and less than amount would be food. Or you might want to leave them for the client and say, hey, what did you spend this money on at 7-Eleven? So that's this quick tutorial. I know it's not really heavy and in-depth, but I think a lot of people struggle with it. I think it's a really good tool. To help you to get your books done fairly quickly. It just saves a lot of time. This is one of the big reasons why QuickBooks Online is superior to the desktop version, in my humble opinion. So if you have any questions, comments, please feel free to reach out to me on Facebook. Thank you so much for watching. Bye now. Bye.
