Stop manually balancing your books

Seasoned accountants will remember sitting with a bank statement printout and manually entering each transaction into the accounting system, crossing each one off with a pen and ruler as they went along. Mistakes often crept in, although this was only noticed when the books didn’t balance at the end of the month.

Then things got fancy. Accounting systems evolved, with the ability to import bank statements and automatically capture transactions. There was still some manual work involved: accountants had to assign each transaction to an account and make sure everything was accounted for. But errors still slipped through.

Now, there’s been another advancement in accounting integration technology: Bank Feeds make bank reconciliation even faster. While pulling information from your bank account into your accounting system multiple times a day is not necessarily new, few accountants and businesses are benefiting from the time-saving and accuracy this automated approach offers.

Bank Feeds makes capturing and processing of recurring transactions as easy as logging onto an Internet banking profile. All in real-time and secured by a third-party financial services provider.

How it works

Most accounting solutions support Bank Feeds functionality.

Once activated, you can link directly with most large banks and financial institutions globally. After you’ve entered your Internet banking details, you’ll need to give the service provider permission to access your banking account. Now, every time you log into your accounting system, Bank Feeds screen scrapes your statement and automatically imports new transactions.

To allocate recurring transactions to an account or customer with no future manual intervention, simply create rules to map them. For example, payments to staff accounts can be mapped to register under the payroll line item. You only need to create the rule once and, if anything in the payment reference changes, the system will alert you to the change, as well as to any transactions that have not been assigned rules.

Here are some compelling reasons to active Bank Feeds today:

• It makes bank reconciliation quick and easy;
• You’ll buy time by assigning rules to focus on better serving customers, improving efficiencies, or growing your business;
• Errors are drastically reduced – possibly eliminated – giving you peace of mind that your books will balance at the end of every month;
• Since Bank Feeds pulls transactions into your accounting system every time you log on, you’ll have a real-time view into your business’s finances;
• It’s completely secure, since you only need to provide your Internet banking details to the third-party service provider.

With one less thing to worry about, Bank Feeds empowers accountants to focus on becoming business advisors and consultants to their clients. They can add true value by helping clients with their financial strategy, business development, and forecasting, while also growing their own revenue.