LESSON 6 – BUILDING BLOCKS FOR REPORTING- BEST PRACTICE BANK FEED WORKFLOWS

Best practice bank feed workflows

Learning outcomes
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to:

1. Recognize best practice workflows for Bank Feed transactions

The story so far
With your expert coaching, Craig is now following best practice
workflows for all his customer and vendor transactions.
Bank feeds is where this all comes together. Let’s see how you can
guide Craig to follow best practice here as well.

How can QuickBooks Online help?

The more you use QuickBooks Online banking, the better it gets at
matching bank transactions with QuickBooks transactions.
But you can easily add transactions that don't have a match straight
from the Banking Center.

Best practice bank feed workflows

Craig’s been doing great at following the best practice sales,
expenses, and vendor workflows that you learned about in modules 3
and 4. This means that his bank feed is in great shape.
When he reviews his bank feed, for the most part he wants
to match transactions. This way, he is linking the bank feed item to a
transaction that’s already in his QuickBooks Online.
Once he’s done this, there might still be a few transactions that
QuickBooks can’t find a match for. These could be expenses and/or
deposits he hasn’t recorded and that aren’t posted in QuickBooks
already. But he can go ahead and add each transaction directly from
his bank feed. This will create new posting transactions in QuickBooks
Online right on the spot!

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LESSON 6 – BUILDING BLOCKS FOR REPORTING- BEST PRACTICE BANK FEED WORKFLOWS

Manually adding transactions

Let’s look at how you can help Craig manually add items from the bank
feed into QuickBooks.
Watch the video to see how it’s done. The individual steps are below
for you to follow.

1. As before, from within Craig’s QuickBooks Online account,

select For review to go back to the Banking screen
2. Select the entry for $18.08, an expense Craig paid to Mahoney
Mugs.

The entry will expand and you’ll see the transaction details, but
you need to categorize this expense. It’s currently marked as
an Uncategorized because the bank wouldn’t know how to
categorize it.

3. Select the first drop-down list and scroll down to select Advertising
4. Now select Add to commit this to QuickBooks Online

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Bank feeds FAQ

By coaching your clients in best practice workflows from the outset,
you help set them up for success. But clients may still phone you in a
panic. Let’s look at some of the common mistakes they make so you
can help guide them back to the road to success.
Select the question to find out more.

Why is there a duplicate transaction?

The client likely added a transaction instead of matching it to an
existing transaction. This created identical transactions for the same
amount.
Pro Advice:

 Always match first and check all bank and credit card transactions
to make sure the transaction is not hidden someplace else
 Once this has been confirmed, add is the second option

Why are my invoices still outstanding?

The client likely just added a new deposit in the bank feed instead
of using the correct sales workflow, which would be to receive a
payment against the appropriate customer open invoice.
This causes two issues:

 Open balance on invoice

 Duplicate income deposit

Pro Advice:
The client should have followed correct sales workflow, which is:

 Receive payment against the corresponding customer invoice and

save the deposited amount to Undeposited Funds
 Record the Deposit Transaction based on what actually was
deposited into the bank
 Match the bank feed deposit to the actual QuickBooks Deposit
Transaction

Why are my expenses getting duplicated?

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LESSON 6 – BUILDING BLOCKS FOR REPORTING- BEST PRACTICE BANK FEED WORKFLOWS

The client probably added new expenses through bank feeds

instead of matching checks through banking with expenses already
entered as checks in QuickBooks.
Pro Advice:
The client should have followed the correct expense workflow, which
is:

 Create a check expense in QuickBooks Online

 Match the bank feed check transaction to the QuickBooks Online
check expense

Why do I still have transactions in the bank feed that do not match my transactions in
QuickBooks Online?
The client most likely typed a date incorrectly in the original
QuickBooks Online transaction and the transactions are not getting
automatically found or recognized in the bank feed.
Pro Advice:
Select Find match to locate the transaction to use.

Do I need to manually enter prior period transactions, expenses, and deposits if I have not
used QuickBooks before?
It’s time-consuming to enter a year’s worth of historical checks and
deposits using the transaction forms.
Pro Advice:
The simple way to recreate prior period accounting data for your
client’s QuickBooks file is to:

 Link your client’s QuickBooks Online to their bank account and

select the appropriate period ranges OR
Perform a manual bank import for the exact period you are
recreating in QuickBooks
 Then, select Add for each of the transactions from the bank feed to
create the transactions in their QuickBooks Online

Correctly categorizing income and expense transactions is key to

making certain the prior period data is accurate and ready for the
client’s review.

Take our ProAdvisor challenge

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LESSON 6 – BUILDING BLOCKS FOR REPORTING- BEST PRACTICE BANK FEED WORKFLOWS

Take our ProAdvisor challenge and check your understanding of what

you covered in this lesson.
Select the headings to find out more.
The challenge
You’re reviewing Craig’s bank feed to match or add all his transactions
to his QuickBooks Online transactions.
There’s an uncategorized expense for $185.00 that QuickBooks hasn’t
found a match for. Help Craig tidy this up by categorizing it as Gas and
Electric and then manually adding it to his QuickBooks Online.
Open Craig’s QuickBooks Online

How did you do?

You can check if you got it right by selecting the Reviewed tab from
the Banking Center.
You should be able to see the transaction for Chin’s Gas has been
added to Expense: Utilities: Gas and Electric.

Lesson check
Craig calls with a problem. He sees a duplicate transaction for some job materials he
bought at Hicks Hardware.
What might have caused this?

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LESSON 6 – BUILDING BLOCKS FOR REPORTING- BEST PRACTICE BANK FEED WORKFLOWS

 Instead of adding the transaction from his bank feed, he matched

it

 Instead of matching the transaction from his bank feed, he added

it

 He added the transaction twice from his bank feed

 There’s no way this could have happened. QuickBooks will check

it’s a unique entry

That’s right. By adding the transaction from his bank feed instead of
matching it to an existing transaction, he created identical
transactions for the same amount.
Pro Advice:

 Alwaysmatchfirst and check all bank and credit card transactions

to make sure transaction is not hidden someplace else
 Once this has been confirmed,Addis the second option