How To Manually Add Bank Feed Transactions QuickBooks Online

Refer to the YouTube Tutorial shown here: Manually Add Bank Feed Section: QuickBooks Online 2024  for the visual demonstration and clarification. 

If you have manually connected your bank account to QB Online, you assume that entered transactions are being automatically routed to that account. This is accurate. But when you’re setting up/connecting your account to QuickBooks, the time period for transactions to be historically transferred varies by institution. If you have transactions that are older than the period accepted by the bank, they need to be manually added. 

Perhaps your bank doesn’t support QB. Again, these transactions will need to be manually transferred. There may be other instances where you will need to manually transfer these funds, and we’ll go through the steps of how to do this; touch on using third party applications for import; mapping and formatting an Excel statement. 

Should you want to transfer that PDF bank statement into QuickBooks because of the sheer number of transactions, there’s a way! From the Accountant menu, click on Transactions then Bank Transactions. This page also allows you to connect your bank account, but for the purpose of this video, we’re assuming this step is completed. 

  *It is highly recommended that, until you’re familiar with the process, to only start with a few feeds. Until the transactions are actually posted to the account, there is room for errors and corrections. After posting, corrections become more complicated.  

From Bank Transactions, we want to go to the Upload Transactions button. You will then access the magic Manually Upload Your Transactions screen which allows you to select the transactions you wish to bring in.  

A good way to do this is using a third-party app, such as AutoEntry (a personal favorite) or a similar app to convert your PDF statement to Excel. These apps will allow you to scan, photograph or email entries from receipts, bank statements or invoices and publish the results to Excel, then export them to QuickBooks.  

For the purpose of this video, we are going to use AutoEntry to convert our bank statement to Excel. In AutoEntry, we can click on Bank Statements to check the statements that have already been exported using the account name and date range. (When bringing in a new statement, you can bring them in through the Home Page.)  Choose the account name, go to Bank Statements, click on Inbox to view your upload. From the Inbox,  navigate to Download (the three dots to the right.) We can then go to Activity under the Bank Statement tab, and it should allow you to view the download. 

Again, for the purpose of this video, we’ve saved our download to Desktop. We can alter it to make it easier to transfer. Viewing the import, the bank has only brought in deposit or check. You can add a memo to add recognizability. We created a tab for import ready. We then deleted the empty header rows: A header row in Excel is the first row at the top of a table that labels each column and acts as a title for the information in each column. This will be used by QB as your translation row. (Mapping is knowing the utilities available in QB and adjusting our import information/Excel sheet to make it “cleaner”.)  We use the header row to map; that means we use information from the header row to enter it into the books. 

In our example, we’re also going to remove column “A” which contains unnecessary information, i.e., the period of transactions because we are bringing in transactions with an actual date. 

We’re going to use the Import Ready tab to navigate to Move or Copy. Then we go to New Book and Create a Copy, then OK. This will simplify and help avoid accidentally accessing any other import. 

Let’s save as Import Ready/ Video and format as a CSV file (comma separated values). 

Navigate back to QuickBooks, Manually Upload Your Files, then Select Files. The pop up will show the file as Video and Import Ready. We’ll open that file.  

Reviewing so far: We’ve sent our transactions to AutoEntry or similar program. They’ve been converted to a CSV or Excel format. It’s been saved as a CSV on the computer. From there, we’ve cut any unnecessary columns so that all we’re left with are the header rows we’re using for mapping. We’ve uploaded it to QuickBooks after verifying the compatible file type. 

We’re going to continue from our file selection in QuickBooks to the Which Account are These Transactions From? tab. Check, check, and double check that you select the correct account. We’ll select Continue and go to Let’s Set up Your Files in QuickBooks. You’ll see the question, “Is the first row in your file a header?” Yay! We’re ahead of the game because we’ve already done that so yes. We select the number of columns showing amounts and the date format. (We can modify the date format, if needed, by right clicking the date format in the file, choosing the date type, and saving your changes.) It is so important to ensure compatibility in the task you’re doing. As a safeguard, you can back track and re-upload. 

It is so useful when setting up your file to name your columns to conform to the QuickBooks fields. It’s a lot easier to change our descriptions/format in Excel rather than having to singularly do them in QB. It may be an extra step, but it makes it easier and cleaner to download your files.  

Continuing under the Import Bank Transactions in QuickBooks, our example has: Date-Column 1, Description-Column 2, Credit-Column 4, Debit-Column 3, and Check Number-Column 6. After verifying our columns/formats, we will continue to Choose the Transactions you want to import page. You’ll notice the two columns have been converted to one column as positive and negative values. 

Finally, we reach the Let’s verify and import your transactions. Thanks to our cleverness and taking those extra steps to map our document, we’re ready to continue. If you’re new to doing this, it’s strongly recommended to start with a few transactions just to make sure they’re posting as you want them. 

QuickBooks will ask you if you want to import now and you can ecstatically click the yes button. Import completed! Your bank account will pop up and it’s beautiful. Congrats!