QuickBooks Desktop 2021 - Advanced Bank Feeds

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Intuit recently released QuickBooks 2021 Desktop. Insightful Accountant has been evaluating various pre-release versions of these products for months and has spent hours communicating with Intuit personnel, including product managers and developers, so we can help you learn about the new products. This article is one in a series of individual product features intended to provide additional content to that within our QuickBooks Desktop 2021 product synopsis.

Advanced Bank Feeds

You may have seen us refer to this feature as 'Improved Bank Feeds' because Intuit referred to it that way in their promotional literature regarding the feature, but under the preference settings where users select the option of using this new bank feed method it is referred to as the 'Advanced Mode' so we are calling it 'Advanced Bank Feeds' even though we may address it as 'improved' over both the 'Express Mode' and 'Classic Mode'.

Bank Feeds is the online banking feature in QuickBooks Desktop that lets you connect to your financial institution so you can download transactions and use other online services. Through Bank Feeds, you can process bank and credit card transactions efficiently giving you extra time for your other business needs.

Despite the sophistication of the ‘Express Mode’ of Bank Feeds, there have still been issues. Users have had to manually categorize far too many bank feed transactions not in their books because of limited or inaccurate bank rule-based automation. This meant they had to spend a lot of time manually adding details such as payee, memo, class, and other information to their imported transactions. Another time- consuming chore associated with bank feeds was a lack of batch action processing, as a result, users had to manually update their new downloaded transactions one-by-one.

QuickBooks Desktop 2021 has made substantial improvements to overcome prior limitations of Bank Feeds and achieve improved efficiency with an entirely new 'mode' that is called 'Advanced Mode'. Rather than simply switch every to this new format, this new ‘Advanced Mode’ of Bank Feeds is optional because Intuit Developers realized that some QuickBooks users liked their current Bank Feed option.

Getting Started with Advanced (Mode) Bank Feeds

To select the new Bank Feeds enhancement, you must be logged in as the QuickBooks Administrator, then choose Edit from the QuickBooks Menu bar, then select Preferences, then choose Checking, then click on the Company Preferences tab, and now choose 'Advanced Mode' under Bank Feeds (as shown below).

Using Advanced Bank Feeds for Daily Transactions

To launch Bank Feeds, begin at the QuickBooks menu bar, select Banking, then choose Bank Feeds, then select Bank Feeds Center.

Even more than ‘Express Mode’, QuickBooks’ Advanced Bank Feeds will automatically categorize a majority of downloaded transactions by payees, accounts, and classes with improved matching to any transactions that may already exist within QuickBooks.

In some cases, QuickBooks can ‘partially match’ a transaction that has been downloaded and it will ask users to review the downloaded transactions against the most likely matched transactions. Users can easily select the appropriate transaction and Confirm match to add the transaction(s) to the register.

In other cases, QuickBooks can’t find a matching transaction for one downloaded from your bank. It might be that there wasn’t a transaction previously entered in QuickBooks.  It might be that it hasn’t been posted via some other method (like the new Receipt Management feature) even though you have downloaded your credit card transactions. It could be that the transaction exists in QuickBooks but there isn't sufficiently different information that QuickBooks simply can’t identify a match. Rarely, a newly downloaded transaction could match an already reconciled transaction within QuickBooks and the smart logic used in Advanced Bank Feeds won’t match them because of the reconciled status.

If the transaction hasn’t been entered in QuickBooks, you can post it via the Unmatched transactions tab simply by entering the appropriate details into the fields for which QuickBooks hasn’t been able to extract the data or apply any rules to match data. You might need to enter the Payee, or the Account or the Class within the appropriate fields, each of which has drop-down access to the corresponding QuickBooks lists.

If you need to split a transaction into more than a single line item of detail, you can click on the Drop-down next to the Add, in the Action column and select the ‘Add more details’ from the menu that appears.

Then add as many detail lines as needed to properly itemize the downloaded transaction, when you are ready click ‘Save and send to register’.

To facilitate the posting of multiple transactions from downloaded Bank Feed data, the new batch action capability permits users to quickly select multiple transactions, modify them in bulk, and then add them to your books with a minimal number of clicks.

Once unrecognized transactions are confirmed they will appear within the ‘Added to register’ tab.

Enhanced Bank Rule Capabilities

Advanced Bank Feeds continues where 'express bank feeds' stopped when it comes to bank rules. At the same time, bank rules are continually utilizing artificial intelligence and QuickBooks then automatically utilizes these enhanced bank rules to categorize your transactions. Greater 'machine learning' is being applied so that rules are becoming smarter not simply following the first trend encountered.

To access bank rules, from the QuickBooks menu bar click on Banking, then select Bank Feeds, then click on Bank Feeds Center, and then select Rules. 

Because QuickBooks Developers understand that Users have unique transactions that don't always fit specific patterns they allow you to refine or create your own rules, to automatically match and add details to transactions so that you can streamline the matching of future transactions which QuickBooks has not ‘auto-matched’ previously.

One of the new functionalities added to the bank feed rules is the ability to define if a rule is for 'Money-in' or 'Money-out' transactions, this is something we have not been able to do in earlier bank rules. (See the red box in the illustration above). This is a great enhancement to bank rules because it helps users more clearly define how rules should be applied.

This provides added flexibility and efficiency to enhance the AI established rules that help further define categorization criteria in all future bank feed reviews.

Feature Availability: At the time of initial release of QuickBooks Desktop 2021, Improved Bank Feeds is scheduled for release only within the United States, and will be available in QuickBooks Pro and Premier, QuickBooks Accountant, QuickBooks ProPlus, QuickBooks PremierPlus, and QuickBooks Enterprise (all subscription levels).

You will find our summary of QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Enterprise for 2021 along with other related features in the 'Related Links' at the bottom of this feature.

Editor's Acknowledgements

Special thanks go out to my good friend Laura Madeira who allowed me to cross-check my articles with advance copies of her features to make certain that we were consistent in providing accurate information regarding the 2021 release. Laura, and her co-author Karen Siewert, have written three separate articles this year covering different aspects of the QuickBooks 2021 release, please be certain to check them out at Intuit's Firm of the Future blog:

I also want to thank the following Intuit personnel for their dedication in providing information, numerous briefings, and responding to my questions, as well as in guiding the actual product developments within QuickBooks Desktop and this release: Rachna Arya, Nipun Bhatia, Aditya Dixit, Sowmya Murthy, Madhumita Tayade, Muthuraj Thangavel, Tulasi Vijay Kumar Thulluru, and Raman Verma. I also want to say thanks to Michelle Berg, Mindy King, and Shawn Sturgeon from Intuit for additional product briefings and information along with the various members of Intuit's Alpha & Beta Product Testing Teams for QuickBooks 2021.

Of course, there are entire teams, composed of hundreds of Intuit personnel behind all of these people that make the magic happen and we so often forget to say, thank you, to them, so to all involved, “Thank You for Another Great Product"!

Note: Some images used in this feature are displayed directly as provided by Intuit, others may have been modified from the source material Intuit provided.