How To Import Bank Transactions Into QuickBooks: Excel & More

hi this is tim yoder with fit small business today i'm going to teach you how to connect your bank accounts in order to import your transactions into quickbooks online this lesson covers only the connection to the bank account in the importing of the transactions to learn how to classify the transactions we have another lesson in part 4 of our series managing bank transactions you can find all 46 of our free quickbooks online tutorials by googling fit small business quickbooks online tutorials so let's get started connecting our bank account the first thing we need to do is make sure we have a account set up in our chart of accounts that's going to receive the bank transactions so let's go to accounting and chart of accounts paul's plumbing has a number of bank accounts today we're going to use this u s bank checking 9966 if you don't already have the account set up you'll want to go up to here and click new and that'll bring up a new screen i'm going to just edit the account i'm going to use and so you'll want to make sure when you create the new account the account type is bank detail type is checking and then give it a name that's descriptive so this is a checking account with u.s bank ending in 9966 okay so if you have a beginning balance when you're setting up a new account if it has a beginning balance you'll want to enter that in this screen that'll take that beginning balance place it into the checking account the offsetting entry will go to an equity account called opening balance and that way that opening balance won't count as either and won't count as income okay so you want to make sure you decide at what point do you want to start using the checking account for your business in quickbooks online and so the beginning balance will be the balance immediately prior to when you want to start recording the transactions in quickbooks online and remember what that date is because we'll need to specify that date when we go to import transactions okay so we have our account created i'm going to save and close now we can connect it to our bank so let's go to transactions banking okay if we don't have any bank accounts connected yet this is the screen we'll see and let's say we want to connect account now you need to find your bank so they support 20 000 local and international banks and so more than likely your bank will be one of them even small local banks generally can be connected this is u.s bank and so i'm just going to click on u.s bank if your bank account is not listed i'll show you another way to import the transactions toward the end of this lesson but for now let's work on just connecting the account so that transactions automatically load on a daily basis so once you select the bank you're going to have to sign into your bank account so prior to starting this whole process make sure that you have online access to your account if you don't you won't be able to do this process so make sure you have online access to your account know what your credentials are your username and your password prior to starting this process so this is telling me i need to connect to u.s bank so i'm going to hit continue now this screen i'm going to pull away here for security purposes i'm going to log into the website okay so now these next few screens will likely be different depending on your bank because these are all all screens that come from your bank account so us bank is asking me basically to confirm that i want to allow them to share my information with intuit which is quickbooks so i'm going to authorize them to do so what data do you want to share so if you have multiple accounts again this is u.s bank but most banks will be similar if you have multiple accounts you want to specify which account and i want to share my checking 9966 submit and close okay and so that was the stuff that was specific to us bank now we can see quickbooks online is actually importing the data do you want to connect this account i have to select it enter account type this is uh oh yeah this is actually a little misnomer says account type it's actually asking you which account do you want to connect to so here i need to choose u.s bank checking 9966 now if you forgot to set up the account that's where we started out with setting up the account but if you forgot to set it up you can add a new account at this point as well so let's select our u.s bank 9966 when do i want to start i'm going to start at the beginning of this year now this is where it was important that you when you set up the account you decided at what date do you want to start recording transactions because that's the date you're going to want to put here you could put a custom date and put the date you want to start recording transactions if there was a balance prior to that date that's the balance you should have entered when you originally set up the account okay so i'm just going to do this here so all of them this year hit connect and it should work automatically from here give it a couple minutes there's not much activity in this account so it should just be a few and here we go so it's bringing over just a few uh those are all the transactions i have in this account um now i will go through and classify them we talk about how to do that in another lesson so i'm going to flip over here to our tutorials so all of our tutorials have a sidebar here that show you the 46 different tutorials in order to in order to find your banking transactions it's this one it's part four and how to manage download banking transactions okay and this is where you can learn about uh tran uh classifying these transactions that have pulled over okay great so this is how we connect the account using your login credentials the transactions will update at least daily or you can come in here and you can manually click update to get them to update and that's all that's to it all you have to do after that is categorize them or if you have some transactions entered in quickbooks for that account you can match them to the existing transactions very slick okay so preferably this is the way you can handle your checking transactions importing your checking transactions however this will only go back a few months it varies a little bit bank to bank but generally it goes back three to six months if you need to import transactions prior to that time you're going to have to import them via a qbo file or a csv file so let's learn how to do that first i'm going to disconnect this account because i want to use the same account again actually you know what before that i'm going to exclude all these transactions this is just my way of deleting again i'm just doing this so that i can use the same account again i'm going to disconnect the account okay so let's do the same thing again but this time instead of connecting the account so that it automatically updates we're just going to upload a file with all of the transactions so i'm going to say upload transactions now i can upload transactions that are in a csv file a qfx qbo ofx or txt file so this is going to depend on your bank you'll need to go into your sign into your bank account um for u.s bank you go into where you're actually viewing the account activity and there's a button download you can choose to either download a qbo or a csv so every bank's going to be a little different preferably you can download the qbo file it's going to be a little bit less work so i've already logged into usbank i found the qbo file and i downloaded it it's right here so all i have to do is drag it and drop it there and click next i also could have done a csv file but the qbo file is a little bit easier so i'm going to go continue which account are these transactions from so again this is where you need to select the checking account and again it's this u.s bank 9966 continue import complete done so that's actually very very quick as well and here are those same five transactions again this time we imported them through a file so the import process is very very quick the difference is with this method you have to go on to the website download the transactions first then click and drag them to your quickbooks for them to be uploaded so preferably you want to connect the account but this is a good alternative the other thing you can do with this is if your bank doesn't offer a qbo file you can download a csv file do exactly the same thing we just did there but there will be an extra step where you'll have to help quickbooks map the columns in your csv file to the correct fields in quickbooks and so it'll give you hints it'll walk you through the process it'll automatically match what it thinks the correct mapping is but you'll have to verify that and make any correction so it is a little bit more difficult with a csv file but it's it's very doable it's it's not that hard but it is more difficult than the qbo file so i think preferably you connect your bank account with your credentials so that it updates automatically if that's not possible or you have to go back further than that history allows you can upload a qbo file from your bank if qbo files are not available you can upload a csv file from your bank and i would almost think all banks would have some sort of csv file or excel spreadsheet download excel spreadsheets can be saved as csv files and used great so once you get your transactions imported again go to our other tutorial which is how to manage and download banking transactions great thank you for watching my quickbooks online video appreciate your time please visit all 46 of our free quickbooks online tutorials by googling fit small business quickbooks online tutorials

This transcript was generated automatically from the video's captions and may contain errors.