6. Connect your Bank Accounts

One of the great features of QBO is that you can connect your bank account and get every transaction from the account imported straight into QBO. This makes entering transactions and reconciling at the end of the month so much easier! 

You’ll want to connect any accounts that are in the organization’s name. This means Checking, Savings, Investment accounts, Credit Card accounts, and Paypal. 

Each bank connection will be a little different depending on who you bank with, and by now you’re probably pretty familiar with navigating QBO. So, we’ll just be doing text for this set of instructions.

• Navigate in the left menu: Transactions > Bank Transactions
• Choose “Link account” near the top right of the screen.
• Start typing in the name of the bank and choose your bank from the list below when you see it.
• From here you will login with your normal login credentials for your bank. This is where it can be a little different depending on the bank and their security features.
• Once you are logged in, there are two important options you will need to choose.
  • How far back you want the bank feed to go.
    • Since you’re just starting out, you can probably go all the way back to when you opened the account. If that’s not possible, just go as far back as it will allow. This is assuming that the org is new, within the first year of operations, or that you’ve had very few transactions in the previous years and will be entering everything.
  • What account in QBO the bank will connect to.
    • For example, If you included your Checking account in your initial COA setup, and you are connecting the checking account bank feed, then you will choose the checking account in the COA for the bank account to connect to. If you are connecting an account that you didn’t include in the COA, then you can choose to have it create a new account. Basically, you just don’t want to let it create a new account if you’ve already set up an account in the COA.
• Follow this process for all of your accounts.
• After you have finished connecting the accounts, you will see a card for each account and a list of imported transactions in the bank feed below them.

Leave the bank feed completely alone for now. Do not be tempted to start adding transactions! We will come back to the bank feed later in The Guide.

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