When QuickBooks is not downloading bank transactions, the cause is usually one of five things: the bank sign-in needs refreshing, the bank changed something, the items are sitting in Excluded or For review, they are still pending at the bank, or they fall outside the dates the bank lets QuickBooks fetch. Check them in that order.
Is the bank feed connection still signed in?
A bank feed stops fetching new transactions when the bank no longer accepts the saved sign-in. The usual triggers are a changed password, an expired security check or a bank that asks you to confirm your identity again. The fix is to run an update, complete the security prompt and see whether the feed wakes up.
Run the update first, before you touch anything else. In QuickBooks Online, open Bank transactions and select Update. Intuit's page on updating recent bank transactions says to enter your multi-factor code if QuickBooks asks, and that the update can take a few minutes.
Signs the sign-in is the problem
- A banner on the account tile says the connection needs attention, or the tile shows an error.
- The balance on the tile is stale, though your bank shows a newer one.
- You changed your online banking password recently, or your bank sent a security notice.
What the nightly update does
QuickBooks Online fetches new transactions by itself each night, with retries if a run fails, and the schedule is set out in connecting a bank feed to QuickBooks Online. So an item that posted at your bank today may simply not have been fetched yet; select Update to fetch sooner.
Fix the sign-in, not just the symptom
If Update asks for a login, enter the one you use on the bank's own website. If the bank locks you out, sign in on the bank's site, clear its prompts and then return to QuickBooks. A bank that has quietly flagged your access will keep failing until you deal with it on its side.
Bank-side changes that break a QuickBooks download
Banks sometimes change something on their side that interrupts the link: scheduled maintenance, a new security step, a redesigned sign-in or a problem that affects every customer. When the break is on the bank's end, nothing you do inside QuickBooks fixes it. The right move is to confirm the cause and wait or work around it.
How to tell
Sign in to the bank's own website. A notice banner is the clearest clue, and so is a sign-in page that behaves differently from last week. In an Intuit community reply on transactions not downloading, a member of the QuickBooks team advises checking the bank's website for alerts or notifications that might be blocking the connection.
Then ask the same question of other people. If the problem started on one day and hit one bank, others on that bank likely see it too. One user in that thread reports the bank account downloading while two card accounts did not, a split that points to a problem with a provider rather than with your file.
What to do while it is down
Do not reconnect in a panic. A bank-side problem usually clears by itself, and reconnecting while it lasts only adds risk. Instead:
- Write down the date of the last good download.
- Keep working in QuickBooks with what you have.
- Retry Update once a day.
- If it stays down for several days, plan to fill the gap from a file.
Filling the gap from a file
When the feed is down, the cleanest bridge is a file of the missing days. Download a CSV or QBO file from the bank, or turn a PDF statement into one, and upload only the dates the feed missed. Finding the exact gap in missing bank transactions shows how to pin down which days are absent, and the same guide covers cutting the file down to those days.
Downloaded bank transactions hiding in Excluded or For review
Many transactions that seem not to have downloaded did arrive and are filed somewhere you are not looking. QuickBooks Online sorts downloads into three tabs: For review, Categorized and Excluded. A line in Excluded or Categorized does not show in For review, so it looks missing.
Intuit's article on finding missing downloaded transactions describes each place to look. Work through them in turn.
The tabs, one by one
- For review. New downloads land here. They do not count in your books until you categorize them.
- Categorized. If you or a bank rule already categorized the line, it moved here. Check which account it went to; if it is wrong, unmatch it and move it.
- Excluded. Transactions marked personal or duplicate go here and are not added to your accounts. To restore one, select Undo, then categorize it from For review.
An Intuit staff reply in the community thread adds a related point: if a transaction was moved to Excluded earlier, QuickBooks will not download it again, so check that tab before concluding it is missing.
Filters and searches
A forgotten filter hides lines. Clear any active filters on the bank transactions screen, then search by amount or payee. A single $212.40 payment is easier to find by amount than by scrolling.
Uncategorized accounts
Lines without a specific account land in Uncategorized Income or Uncategorized Expense. Run a report on those accounts, or open the bank account's history, and look for the missing amount there. A line can be in your books under the wrong name and still be absent from where you expect it.
A quick way to settle it
Pick one missing transaction and search for its amount in all three tabs and in the Uncategorized accounts. If you find it, the feed worked and the issue was where you were looking. If you do not, move to the next section.
Why are some bank transactions never downloaded?
A few specific items may never appear because of limits on what the feed fetches, not because the feed is broken. QuickBooks downloads only transactions that have cleared, it cannot reach back beyond a bank-set date range, and an earlier Excluded decision stops a line from returning. Each has a different remedy.
The date range is shorter than you expect
Intuit's article says banks can limit the date range for automatic downloads, so transactions outside that range will not be imported. The staff reply in the community thread says Update cannot retrieve transactions older than 90 days and suggests uploading them to QuickBooks Online instead. If the missing items are older than that, no amount of retrying the feed will bring them in.
Importing older bank transactions into QuickBooks Online explains how to pull in older months.
The start date was set too late
When you first connected the feed, you picked a start date. Anything before it was never requested. If the first months of a year are missing, look at when the connection began.
Pending items
Some missing transactions are pending, which has its own section below.
Odd one-offs
Occasionally a single line is skipped without a clear cause. If one line is truly absent after you have checked every place above, add it by hand or include it in a file upload for that date.
What not to expect
Do not expect the feed to be a perfect copy of the bank. Treat the bank statement as the record. The most reliable check is to compare the QuickBooks balance to the statement's closing balance. Uploading bank statements to QuickBooks Online covers bringing a statement in when the feed cannot.
Pending card transactions that vanish from the download
A pending transaction is a charge the bank has authorized but not yet posted. QuickBooks downloads only transactions that have cleared, so a pending charge does not appear in the feed, and if the bank changes the amount or description at posting, the line you remember can look different when it arrives.
The staff reply in the community thread says this directly: QuickBooks only downloads transactions once they've cleared. So yesterday's charge missing from this morning's download is expected behavior, not a fault.
Why a charge seems to vanish
A common pattern: you see a $54.20 fuel charge on your banking app on Monday, it is not in QuickBooks on Tuesday, and then on Thursday it shows up with a slightly different amount or a different date. A hotel or fuel hold is the typical cause, because the final amount differs from the hold. The posted line is the real one. The pending line was never in QuickBooks, so nothing was lost.
What to do
- Wait a few business days before you worry about a card charge.
- Compare against the bank's posted transactions, not its pending list.
- If you entered the charge by hand already, expect the posted line to match your entry, or to need matching if the amount changed.
When pending is not the answer
If a charge posted at your bank more than a week ago and is still not in QuickBooks, it is not pending. Go back through the Excluded tab and date range checks.
The troubleshooting order, start to finish
Work in this order, because each step is safer than the next:
- Update the connection and complete any security prompt.
- Check whether the bank has an outage or alert.
- Look in Excluded, Categorized and the Uncategorized accounts.
- Check the date range and the start date.
- Disconnect and reconnect, as the last resort.
Disconnecting comes last because reconnecting makes you choose a start date again, and a wrong choice can bring back lines you already handled. Back up first, and note your last good date before you start. If you cannot recover the days by any of these steps, the practical answer is a file. SimpleBankConvert is being built to turn a PDF statement into a CSV or QBO file for that job, and you can join the early-access list at Get started.