Introduction

Bank Feeds allow you to automatically import bank statement lines from your bank or financial institution, removing the need to download and import statements manually and ensuring your bank information is up-to-date. 

Once a bank feed connection (consent) has been made between your bank and the system, bank statement lines are imported up to four times a day. Thereafter, Bank Consents need to be renewed every 90 days to comply with Open Banking Standards.

To complete the reconciliation process, refer to the relevant sections of Automating Bank Reconciliation.‍ 

If your bank does not have a feed, you can download and manually import bank statements. See Manual Bank Reconciliation for more details.‍ Alternatively do this with electronic statement files. For further information, see Automating Bank Reconciliation.‍ 

Prerequisites

• Online banking details
• Admin user role
• "Bank Feeds Setup" permission under Maintain Menu Profiles. See Setting Up System Users‍ for more details.

See:

Bank Feeds (6B.1) - AIQ Academy

Importing bank statements manually (6B.2) - AIQ Academy

Setting up Bank Feeds

In order to automatically import bank statement lines to AccountsIQ, you need to create a consent with your bank and link this to one or more Bank Account codes in AIQ.

Creating a new Consent

1.  Go to Bank > Bank Feeds Setup > Connect Bank Feeds.

2. Click Connect Feed and follow the onscreen instructions to securely connect to your bank using Plaid (see FAQs for more information on data sharing and security with Plaid)
3. Once you have selected your institution, you will be directed to authenticate your credentials with your institution.
4. Finally, you will be redirected to AccountsIQ to link the bank accounts for this consent to Bank Accounts set up in AccountsIQ.
   
   Enter the synchronise from Date which: 

• Should be when you want to start importing statement lines from.
• Can be adjusted once the consent has been set up if needed.
• Can be up to 12 months ago.

Managing Consents

Bank Feeds must be renewed every 90 days to keep your data safe and to comply with Open Banking regulations.

You can view all of your consents and their status from Bank > Bank Feeds Setup
You will see a warning 1 week before a consent is due to expire, you can renew or revoke consents at any time.

If you hold more than one bank account with a particular institution, you can create a single consent which will cover all accounts held with that institution (this will cut down on the number of consents you need to renew). Note the following:

• You will only be able to create consents for accounts that you have online banking access to.
• Certain banks may have rules over the number of consents that can be created and /or the number of users who can create consents. 

Using Bank Feeds

Once you have created a consent for a bank account, to view the imported statement lines, click Import Bank Statement, and select the bank account from the dropdown.
 

Bank feeds import all bank statement lines from linked accounts four times a day. You can also click Synchronise Transactions at any point to refresh the feed (for example if you want to start using a feed straight away after creating the consent).
 

The feed will now refresh automatically until the consent expires or is revoked.
 

You can use Bank matching rules and suggested Auto postings to match all your imported transaction lines to posted transactions and then Reconcile the bank as required. See Automating Bank Reconciliation‍ for more details.‍ 

Revoking a Bank Feed

If you want to revoke a bank feed to stop importing transaction lines automatically:

1. Go to Bank > Bank Feeds Setup and find the relevant consent in the list.
2. Click Actions > Revoke Consent.

Renewing a Bank Feed

Consents for Bank Feeds expire every 90 days, this is to keep your data safe and to comply with Open Banking regulations.
 

You can check the status of all bank feeds from the Bank List or from the Bank Feeds Setup screen.



You will see a warning when consents are due to expire in the next 7 days.

When a consent is due to expire, you can renew the consent by clicking Actions > Renew Consent.

You can also renew the consent at any time from Actions > Revoke Consent and creating a new consent from Connect Bank Feeds.

Al full history of all consents can be viewed from Bank > Bank Feeds Setup. A number of filters have been set up to help you view and manage your consents.


 

You can download a consent activity log, from Actions > Download Activity Log. This shows the details of the feed and also the imported transactions.

 Security

How do I know my bank account details are safe?

AccountsIQ has partnered with Plaid to provide the technology that enables consumers to connect payment accounts and other financial accounts to our accounting software. Plaid is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 (Firm Reference Number: 804718) for the provision of payment services, listed in the Open Banking directory. 

Find out more about Plaid and Account Information Services here.