I was looking through some job offerings on Freelancer.com and noticed that some people were offering to pay to for someone to enter 12 to 20 months worth of bank statements into QuickBooks® Online Financial Software.  That in itself is not so bad, but the bank statements were said to have anywhere from 150 to 200 transactions per month.  That would be between 3,000 and 4,000 transactions to type in manually.  To make matters worse, QuickBooks Online is nowhere near as streamlined as the desktop version.  That could take a really long time!

If you ever find yourself in the position of having to enter large amounts of banking transactions into QuickBooks, consider importing them from a file you can download from your bank.  I believe some banks can connect directly with your QuickBooks Online accounts, so importing transactions can go quite smoothly.  If you are using the desktop version of QuickBooks, you can download a QBO file of your transactions to your computer and then import them directly into QuickBooks.

Convert CSV files to QBO files

Not all banks make your transactions available in a QBO file, but most do allow you to download a CSV file.  QuickBooks will not import data from a CSV file into your bank account in your company file, but there is a software program that will take that same CSV file and convert it into a QBO file.  I have used it many times and have found that it works great.  It is called CSV2QBO by Propersoft.  It is $49.99.  When I purchased it a few years ago I really didn’t want to spend $50, but it has been well worth it.  As a professional bookkeeper I have had many opportunities to use it and it has saved me hours of time.

The nice things about the Bank Feeds feature in QuickBooks is that it will memorize your preferences.  It will give you the choice of memorizing which accounts go with which vendors from the imported transactions.  This will save you even more time in the future as most businesses tend to have many of the same types of transactions from month to month.  If you haven’t tried it out, I highly recommend you do.

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