How to Connect Bank & Credit Card Accounts in QuickBooks

To make sure your financial statements are accurate, all accounts used for business transactions should be connected to QuickBooks.

Typically a business will have one or many bank and credit card accounts used to operate the business. The transactions in these accounts are necessary to get complete and accurate financial statements and ultimately a full picture of the business. Any missing accounts will create gaps in your financials and prevent you from having an accurate view of your business.

The easiest way to ensure a complete set of transactions is to connect your accounts to QuickBooks.

Connecting your accounts allows QuickBooks to automatically import transactions. This will ensure QuickBooks has the most accurate and up-to-date information. There are alternative methods to utilizing QuickBooks without connecting your accounts, but these will require significant manual processing and can introduce opportunities for errors, so avoid this at all costs.

This video walks you through the specific steps to connect your accounts to QuickBooks.

How to connect your bank & credit card accounts to QuickBooks Online

3 tips to ensure success when connecting accounts

Choose the right import start date

You will also need to choose what date QuickBooks should go back and bring in past transactions.  I would align this date with the bank statement date for that period. This may not be the end of the month.  This ensures your beginning balance will align to the ending balance from that statement. This ultimately allows for a cleaner first bank reconciliation.

Account name should include the last 4 digits of your account number

You will also need to assign the bank or credit card account to an account in your chart of accounts or you can have it set up a new account in your chart of accounts.  Once assigned to an account in your chart of accounts, you can always rename the account.  A good suggestion is to include the last four digits of the account number in the account description on the chart of accounts.

Beginning Bank Balance

Sometimes QuickBooks will bring in the bank beginning balance.  You will want to make sure that matches the statement ending balance from the period immediately preceding when you start tracking transactions in QuickBooks.