How to Download Bank Transactions to QuickBooks 2019

Watch the QuickBooks 2019 video tutorial. We will discuss how to download bank transactions. And, find out the pitfalls of doing such operation in QuickBooks.

We are working in module seven right now where we’re talking about the different banking activities that QuickBooks has available.

We’ve talked about working with the registers a little bit. I want to talk to you now a little bit about downloading your transactions from your bank’s website.

This may or may not be a good idea. Depending on how many options in QuickBooks you’re actually using. Let me take a few minutes and tell you why I say that. And then, I’ll show you how to download transactions (if that’s what you choose to do for your business).

Before I show you how to go in and actually download your transactions. Let’s talk about why I said it may or may not be a good idea. I want you to think about something. When you download from the bank, all you’re doing is downloading the checks or the deposits into your actual checkbook register. Right here!

That means that the register would be correct. But think about this! Let’s say you have invoiced a customer, and you receive a payment. If you’ve already made that deposit, (which you should have if you’re following the flowchart), then, you don’t want to download that deposit a second time! Why? Because, then, it would be in there twice.

That’s scenario number one!

Here’s scenario number two. Let’s say, you did create an invoice and you did receive payment. And, you stopped there! You never put that deposit in your checkbook. What would happen is your checkbook would be correct (when you download it). But, you would never take that money out of undeposited funds, because you didn’t complete the whole cycle here.

How about bills? Let’s say, you’ve entered a bill. And then, let’s say that you paid it. That means that the check is already in the register. Why do you want to put it in twice? So, you have to be very careful when you’re downloading from the bank because you don’t want to download everything.

And then, also, you’re going to see that sometimes it doesn’t have the right accounts. Then, you have to figure things out. So, it could be more trouble than it’s worth, but that’s up to you!

I usually say go ahead and do about a weeks’ worth or maybe a couple days if you had a lot of transactions, but don’t try to do a whole years’ worth at once because if it’s screwed up then the whole thing is screwed up and you’re going to have a really hard time fixing it.

But let me show you where to go if you’d like to download your transactions.

There’s a couple of ways you can do this. Number one, if you’re in the check register, you’re going to be able to download from there.

You’ll actually see a button here that says: “Download Transactions”. The other thing is that, if you go to your bank’s website, you can download into QuickBooks.

It’s probably suggested that you do it from within QuickBooks because you’re going to see there’s going to be a little holding window and you’ll be able to pick and choose what you’d like to pull over if you do it this way.

I’m going to click on Download Transactions.

When you download transactions, you’re going to see on the left all of the bank accounts that you’ve initially hooked up to work with the download feature.

There is an initial process, you’ll have to go through where you log in to that particular bank account. The QuickBooks recognizes it for future reference.

You do have the ability to download your credit cards as well. Not just checking accounts. This could be checking, savings, and credit cards.

You’ll want to click on the account that you’re trying to download from. It will give you the current balance that’s in the bank and it will give you your current balance in QuickBooks. You’re going to come over here and click Transaction List. And then, it’s going to download anything since your last download.

So, if you’ve already downloaded something you can’t download it again.

What you’re going to see here are all the transactions that have not yet been pulled into QuickBooks. You can go down the list and check off the ones you’d like to pull over.

Notice, that you will have to check things like the payee’s name. There’s not going to be one for most of your transactions. So, you’ll have to go figure out what this check was for and put in the payee.

You’ll have to put in the account (which account this would go to). You’ll have to put in the class. And then, you do have some actions over on the right. You can quickly add this particular one (once you get all that information in).

You might have some bills that you want to mark as paid. There’s just several different things you can do here.

Let me mention the Match to existing. What that means is that if it recognizes you already have a transaction in the register for the exact same amount it will allow you to match to an existing transaction in this window.

It may not always be the correct one, so you’ll always want to investigate just to make sure. But once you check those off, then, you have the ability down at the bottom where you see Batch Actions to go ahead and add or approve all the checked ones and that will put it over in QuickBooks.

You would choose to ignore ones that might already be in QuickBooks or ones you don’t want to pull over. And, that’s how the whole download process works.

You can always get out of this and finish it later if you want. Anything you’d already pulled into this window would stay here so you wouldn’t have to download it again, but that’s how that would work.

All you need to do when you’re finished is close the bank feeds and then you’ll be good to go until the next time.

So just pay attention to those things I said. Make sure you only download a couple days at a time just to make sure it’s going to work for you. And if it doesn’t then you’ll know that you need to enter these by hand.

Well, that’s how downloading is going to work. I’m going to have you go over now to section three where we’re going to talk about creating entries and writing manual checks in QuickBooks.

Cindy McGuckin

Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy currently manages the IT Training Department at Trident Technical College, she's a Member of the Association of IT Professionals, Charleston, SC chapter and the Treasurer of the South Carolina Association of Continuing Higher Education. Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews. Her no-nonsense approach to teaching complicated topics makes her classes engaging and interesting.