Keep it Connected! QBO tip to save time and $$
Keeping the QBO love going this week ! I want to share a common mistake I see which costs people time, frustration, and ultimately money. I’ve had three clients in the past month that made this mistake and cried for help to fix it! Keep reading to understand the problem, and learn how to avoid it in less than five minutes per month.
The Problem
Not logging into your QuickBooks (QBO) at least monthly causes the bank connections to break and stop "fetching" your data.
So what does this mean to you and why is it important? Here’s how this works:
QBO’s technology uses "fetching" to retrieve and download all data from connected accounts
QBO also uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to learn your behaviors, including how often to fetch
If your "behavior" is to login and update your QuickBooks every six months or so, then it "learns" to only fetch data during these intervals. The problem is that you "use it or lose it", meaning the bank connections become stale and have to be reconnected so that QuickBooks learns to fetch again.
It’s just like training your dog to fetch. After they learn the skill, if you don’t play the "fetch game" for a long time, you will have to start from scratch and re-teach the skill.
So how does this cost you time, frustration and money? When your bank connections break, you have to manually refresh them, which is not too difficult, but the problem is that most banks only pull in the last 90 days of transactions. This is a mess!! I’ve seen clients miss 3 -4 months worth of data, just because they let their connections go stale. This means ALL of their financial reports are wrong. To fix it, they have to hire me (or someone like me) to login to EACH bank account, manually download the missing transactions, map the download to QBO, upload the data to QBO, and then make sure there are no duplicates. Basically, an expensive exercise that could have been avoided in a few minutes each month.
The Simple, 5-minute Monthly Fix
Seriously, the fix takes less than five minutes a month. All you have to do is login to your QuickBooks, and refresh (update) all of the bank accounts → go to the banking module where your accounts are listed and click "UPDATE" in the upper right corner.
This will cause QBO to fetch your transactions and keep the connection fresh. You do not have to categorize the transactions if you don’t want to. You can literally let them sit in the "For Review" section of your bank feeds for as long as you want - they do not go away. The simple act of refreshing the data will save you a ton of time and money because you avoid the hassle of having to manually import the missing transactions.
I LOVE how technology can simplify our lives, but understanding what is actually going on "under the hood" is important so that you get the most out of your systems. They need to be trained to do what you want, when you want . Hope this "training tip" helps you avoid this time and money wasting issue!
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