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About this lesson
Let's discuss how to connect your checking account for a one-way sync.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s exercise file.
7.01 connecting-your-checking-account - Exercise.docx471.4 KB
Quick reference
Connecting your checking account
You can allow your bank to sync with QuickBooks with a one-way sync.
When to use
Connecting your bank to QuickBooks for a one-way sync will save you time as it downloads the data into the banking section (aka bank feeds) for you to quickly organize and put them away. I encourage you to always do this.
Instructions
- Navigate to the banking section of QuickBooks Online
- In the upper right hand corner click on the button that says "link account" (it might say "add account")
- Select the name of your bank
- Enter your credentials
- QuickBooks will ask you which account at the bank you wish to connect (this is true even if there is only one account), select the account(s)
- In the dropdown to the right, select the account in QuickBooks you wish to link this bank account to (or select add new)
- Information will update below, QuickBooks will ask you how far back you wish to go to download data, change this dropdown to pick the duration that's right for you
- Click connect
- Take a deep breath, your to-do list just got longer! You are now ready to organize your bank feeds.
Hints & tips
- This will save you a ton of time. Really.
- 00:04 In this video,
- 00:05 I'm going to show you how to connect your bank account to your QuickBooks.
- 00:09 Up until now we've gone to accounting and then Chart of Accounts.
- 00:13 And we've come up to new and we've said, we've got a new bank account.
- 00:16 We've got a new checking account all this good stuff, but
- 00:18 we haven't connected it to our bank.
- 00:20 So there is not a one way sync.
- 00:23 Our bank isn't downloading data for us to code and put away.
- 00:27 Our QuickBooks is just hoping and expecting that we'll enter stuff by hand.
- 00:32 As much fun as that is, I want you to see how to connect your bank account so
- 00:35 you don't need to enter stuff by hand.
- 00:38 So what we'll do is we'll click on the left hand side, in the gray bar,
- 00:42 we'll click on banking and then banking again.
- 00:45 Down at the bottom, we have two options,
- 00:47 we have Connect account or upload transactions.
- 00:51 I do want to let you know that for the exercises,
- 00:53 I'm asking you to use the QuickBooks sample file.
- 00:56 This process will not work in the QuickBooks sample file.
- 01:00 Okay.
- 01:02 So, upload transactions, means go to your bank,
- 01:05 download your transaction history and then upload it to QuickBooks.
- 01:10 That's useful in some situations, but
- 01:12 I really want you to have an ongoing solution.
- 01:15 And the ongoing solution is to connect to your bank account.
- 01:18 When you do this for
- 01:19 yourself using your real QuickBooks, you'll follow the prompts.
- 01:23 So let's do some of them together.
- 01:25 We'll click on Connect account.
- 01:29 We'll find the bank account we use.
- 01:31 In this example, I'm going to log into Wells Fargo.
- 01:36 It says start by connecting it blah blah.
- 01:39 Click Continue.
- 01:42 It's going to give me a place to put in my Wells Fargo credentials.
- 01:46 In my case, I have two factor authentication set up for
- 01:48 my Wells Fargo account.
- 01:49 So it says it needs to send me a code.
- 01:52 This is probably going to happen to you as well.
- 01:55 So we'll just click Continue We'll let it think for a second and send over the code.
- 02:00 It's going to send the code by text message.
- 02:02 That's great because I want you to see what it looks like when you
- 02:04 have two factor authentication.
- 02:07 You can have two factor authentication and connect your account to your QuickBooks.
- 02:13 So now I get to pick.
- 02:15 In my example, I have one account that I can connect.
- 02:18 If I had a bunch of accounts at Wells Fargo, I would see them all listed here.
- 02:23 I could then select or
- 02:24 unselect the accounts that I wish to connect to my QuickBooks.
- 02:28 Once you've clicked the accounts you wish to connect to your QuickBooks,
- 02:32 click on the blue continue.
- 02:35 It says do you want to confirm?
- 02:36 Say yeah, I have confirmed I'm happy, I wish to connect.
- 02:40 So connect again.
- 02:43 What's happening here is there's a connection between your bank account and
- 02:46 your QuickBooks.
- 02:48 It's a one way sync where QuickBooks is saying I'm going to go gather information.
- 02:52 I'm going to download it into your QuickBooks for you.
- 02:55 In this case I've set all right.
- 02:57 My one account and again, if I had multiple, I would see multiple boxes here.
- 03:02 This is the account I have at my bank and to the right,
- 03:04 I'm going to select which account what I like to connect it to in my QuickBooks.
- 03:09 So in my QuickBooks, I'd like to connect this to my checking 1234.
- 03:15 The next thing that comes up says, how far back do you want to go to get information?
- 03:20 When I click the drop down, I can see,
- 03:21 I can pull this month today, this year, last year.
- 03:26 I'm just going to pull for this month.
- 03:29 When you're setting up your Quick Books for
- 03:30 the first time, I encourage you to pick a really clean dividing date.
- 03:35 And really, if you can,
- 03:36 I would say the beginning of the year is a great dividing date.
- 03:39 I know it's a lot of work to go back to the beginning of the year,
- 03:42 especially if you're toward the end of the year.
- 03:44 But it's just going to make your work a lot easier,
- 03:46 so you're not trying to keep track of, okay.
- 03:48 The first four months my accounts were here, and then the second four months,
- 03:52 my accounting is there.
- 03:53 Like just pick something.
- 03:55 For the purpose of this video,
- 03:56 we're just going to go back to the beginning of this month.
- 03:59 So I'm going to click Connect.
- 04:02 It's going to take a few minutes to download the data.
- 04:05 So we shall wait.
- 04:07 So what's happened now is where I didn't have a tile before I have tiles.
- 04:12 Earlier in the videos, I had tiles cause I uploaded data from other accounts just
- 04:16 that I had examples to work with.
- 04:19 But now I have the one tile, I have checking 1,2,3,4.
- 04:23 I have 14 transactions.
- 04:25 These are all the things I need to deal with.
- 04:28 So that is how to connect your account.
- 04:29 I'm not going to connect additional accounts.
- 04:32 But I do want to show you that if you had more accounts, say for example,
- 04:36 you had a checking.
- 04:37 And then separately you had a credit card and separately,
- 04:40 you had a different bank account at a different place.
- 04:42 You can click link account in the upper right hand corner.
- 04:46 And you can select additional accounts and
- 04:48 just follow those earlier steps that we saw.
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