When it comes to your business, there are many new ways to streamline your accounting. Now you have switched to a digital way of working, you can fully utilise the software to make your day-to-day much more manageable and efficient.
One way to stay on top of your business banking is to integrate it with Xero or Quickbooks, both of which are cloud-based and can be accessed anywhere in the world.
If you are unsure how bank feeds through either of these platforms can benefit you, our team at Mayflower is here to help.
What is a Xero or Quickbooks bank feed?
Xero or Quickbook bank feeds allow you to track and manage receipts and expenses without having to manually enter every bank transaction.
Whether it’s a cash deposit or withdrawal, an online payment, transfers, loan payments or debit card charges, all of these transactions will be imported into your programme’s bank feed.
What’s more, this information will be recorded, reported and analysed in real time so you have an accurate and up to date set of figures. This becomes incredibly helpful when it comes round to your annual returns, a major part of Making Tax Digital.
As soon as you have set up the bank feeds you will have all the transactions show up on your statement, ready to reconcile whenever you come to it.
Types of bank feeds
Now we have the basics covered, you need to know about the different types of bank feed which come into play when using Xero or Quickbooks.
The first is a direct feed, this is when you link a feed with one bank account. These feeds will be sent automatically to your nominated account and will show statements once your trading day has finished.
Secondly, you have a PayPal feed, which is only relevant if you accept PayPal transactions for your business. Usually found with ecommerce, PayPal can be set up to directly feed to your account and you will receive statements of the transactions similarly to a direct feed. These transactions will appear every 12 hours, or you can manually refresh your feed to get the latest payments.
Some banks don’t allow for bank feeds to be automatically refreshed, the list of banks that do can be found here for Xero or here for Quickbooks.
If you are using Stripe for online payment processing, you can also link this into your bank feed. Once set up, you can reconcile your Xero or Quickbooks transactions with your Stripe payments.
Bank feeds and your accountant
Being a business owner means you have your time spread between your personal life and all aspects of your business’s performance.
With Xero and Quickbooks, you can give access to other members of your management or your accounting team at Mayflower. By doing so, you are able to leave everyone to it while also having the ability to dip in and out of your bank feeds and financial information so you can stay in the loop.
Taking advantage of the latest software will only benefit you and your business in the long run, and Mayflower is here to support you along the way.
Get in touch today to ask us about online bank feeds.