QuickBooks Online Bank Rules

Using Bank Rules to process transactions from your bank feed will significantly increase your bookkeeping efficiency.

This week’s video walks through how to set up bank rules based on the text imported from the bank and secondary characteristics such as the amount.  It also shows how to either hold the classified transactions for your review and approval, or seamlessly post them directly to your books.

If you have any questions, or would like help setting this up, don’t hesitate to reach out – either ask a question below, or make an appointment through my website.

Video Transcript:

Hi, Kerry here from MyQuickBookKeeping. One of the ways you can use QuickBooks to really save you a lot of time is to set up some bank rules to process transactions that come into your bank feed. Once you’ve connected your bank to QuickBooks, it brings in all of your transactions automatically and if it doesn’t, you can click update on the corner and this shows all transactions for review. So today, we’re going to set up some bank rules that will deal with some of these transactions before you even have to look at them.

Let’s have a look in a sample company now. Select the banking tab on the left hand column. And here we are at the For Review tab. Now this is important. These transactions are being pulled from the bank and here waiting to be dealt with. As you can see, there are suggested matches for some items and others waiting for you to categorize and add them.

Now, if this was our live file, we pop up here and click Update to bring in any transactions that have been processed since this was last updated, which is moments ago. So probably not necessary. So at the top here, we have the tab Bank Rules. We are going to go in here and we’re going to make a new rule. We are going to make a rule for A Rental. For Money Going out, in all bank accounts. When the bank text contains “A Rental” then the transaction type will be an expense, payee will be “A Rental” and the category we are going to post this expense to will be rental expense. Here we go. Equipment rental, right here.

Now, we have an option to automatically add to your books. If you do this, then whenever a transaction comes in from A Rental, it will go straight through, it won’t hit that ”for review” tab. So let’s just go do this now. We’ll save it. Hop back to the banking tab and we can see we have these items here A Rental. Oh only the credits left. The others are gone. Look. They’re in QuickBooks. Here they are. They have been added automatically.

Let us set up another bank rule. Let us have a look back in our For Review tab just to see what we’ve got here. Let’s have a rule for Chin’s Gas. Okay there. So let me pop up here, right bank rules. New rule. This one is for Chin’s Gas. Now, I am going to say that if it is over 200 at Chin’s Gas, it is typically going to be for utilities and if it is below, it is going to be for fuel. That is just a rule that I know, that is something that I know that is pretty common in my business to say even though it is a sample file.

So when money is going out and the bank text contains Chin’s Gas and I am going to add a line. The amount is greater than 200 dollars. Then, the payee will be Chin’s Gas. Here we have them. And the category, if it is greater than 200 dollars, it is going to be utilities. Gas and Electric here we go. And let us not automatically add these because we might want to have a quick look at it first so we’ll save this one.

Now we’ll create another new rule. This is going to be Chin’s Gas. Money out. Bank text contains Chin’s Gas. And we will add a line. And we will say here, if the amount is less than 200 dollars, then will have to payee, once again Chin’s Gas. But this time we are going to have the category, fuel, auto, what do we call it in here, there we go. Fuel. We don’t want to automatically add this because we want to be able to see, just check the transaction before we accept it. So pop back to the bank feed here. Go back to our banking tab for review. If we pop down here, we can see Chin’s Gas. Here it is. Oh automobile fuel. It is under 200 dollars. And I am going to assume that I know that yes that is correct. I am going to add it to my books.

So when we look at our QuickBooks tab here, we should now have 3 transactions. 2 of them went through automatically. One of them was a lot quicker because before it was just sitting there and didn’t know where to go.

Let us now look at our bank feed. What if we go down here? Here is an item for Hicks Hardware. It is a small amount. Now we’ve got guys out in the field and every now and then they just have to run to the hardware store, grab some supplies, we don’t want to spend a lot of time processing those. So we are going to make a new rule just for anything hardware. So we go to new rule. That is going to be hardware. Bank text contains the word hardware and the amount is less than let’s say 50 dollars. And we are going to, we don’t even care what the payee is, we are just going to leave that blank. I am going to put it to jobs anyways. We have here job materials. Fantastic.

And we are going to automatically add this and it is just going to hardware expenses on the job. So let us save this. Back to banking. Let us have a look in QuickBooks and here it is Hicks Hardware. It is going to job materials. 24.38 dollars. Easy.

And let us have a little quick look at the income statement just to see what has happened with all of these. Profit and loss. Scroll down here a little bit. Automobile fuel. Let us open this one up and here we have 185 dollars from Chin’s Oil and Gas or gas and oil. Go back to our report. Now we can go to our equipment rental. Just scroll down and we can find equipment rental and here we have equipment rental. Let us pop into here.

We can see here the two amounts from A Rental have come through. Back to our report. And let us go down to our job supplies. Here we go. Job materials the 24 dollars 38. This might not be the best place we might want to further categorize them but as you can see it is going to our income statement profit and loss.

As you can see, that will save you a lot of time when you go to the review tab, there will be a lot less transactions there for you to deal with. This will make your bookkeeping so much smoother.

It is very important you still do your monthly bank reconciliations. I do have another video that walks you through those steps. You can always book a consultation down below. I’d love to help train you on that. There is month-end checklist down there too and one of the important items on that to check off every month is of course your bank reconciliations. That will get you signed up for my newsletter, which will keep you up to date with changes in QuickBooks, and some of the apps that I have been looking at that I don’t necessarily make a video on. If you like this video, please click like below. Subscribe to my channel and if there is anything else you’d like to know about, please make a comment below and my next video could be for you. Cheers!