Have you synced your bank account with quickbooks?

Personal or corporate?

I used to download all my transactions from the bank to Microsoft Money a couple years ago, and then one of the freeware ones more recently.

And then I stopped, for a couple reasons:

1) it became a chore – download the data every week. Not that it was difficult, but it became a hassle. And I ended up needing to upload every couple of days which was more of a hassle.

2) For expense tracking, it was useless. My bank account shows a payment of $450 to Bank of America Visa Card, so the transaction that got downloaded was $450 – Credit cards.

The problem was that the $450 was itself made up of two restaurant meals, three gas fillups, a new shirt, batteries, jumper cables, and two new books. (and so on). So if I am serious about budgeting, I would have had to break the $450 payment into a dozen or more granular transactions. And that just became too much effort.

So I said the heck with it and only use my checkbook, and don’t really track payments by category.

For business.

We use one function of Quickbooks that imports the transactions separately. You still have to manually add them to your register. It’s amazing because I can see transactions as they hit and catch surprises quickly without having to constantly log into my bank to monitor new pending transactions. We have it set up with our AMEX account and our Bank. It has helped us catch a bogus debit from a shady vendor within the very short time window that allowed us to have it reversed (Our former shady credit card processing company was trying to steal like $800 from us for equipment we had already returned to their rep).

I think the feature is called Quickbooks Connect, but I’m not 100% sure. This is for the desktop version. So it’s not fully integrated like some of the services they offer where Quickbooks can pay transactions on your behalf.

I did for my business. It was fine.

@gorillapaws Thats a very interesting benefit. At the end of the month there is always 2 or 3 transactions from vendors that I need to go back and make sure we actually bought those things. Not because I don’t trust the vendor, but I just want to be sure it’s the correct charge, and yeah, you never know.

Not to mention we have been victims of credit card fraud three times now with our business card. The first time it happened the cop said it sounded like it might be someone inside the bank, because of the details. Your right that I would probably catch it happening sooner if I saw transactions in my QB.

So, how does it work exactly? The transactions show up, and then I say what expense or product?

My clients pay with checks, so how does that work? Right now I create the invoice in another program, and then it syncs to QB. Then I pay with a check and then create the deposit for the bank.

@JLeslie On the Mac desktop version (not the online) it is a separate register/window (I would assume other versions work similarly, but I can’t say for sure). When you hit the refresh button the new transactions appear in that window. You can assign an account to them and import them into your real register with a click. Which is nice because you have the control. I wouldn’t like it if things just started getting added to my books by themselves. If there’s a transaction that you’ve already manually entered before and now hits your bank, then it will show up as a “match,” which is also nice because you know you keyed in the entry correctly. Matched transactions get cleared out of the window when you close it or switch accounts.

Thanks! Very helpful.