Glossary

Bank Feed

A bank feed is the stream of transactions QuickBooks downloads from a connected bank account, and for a business running on Stripe it shows the payout and nothing else, never the individual sales behind it.

Also called: banking feed, bank rules, connected bank account, downloaded transactions, For Review

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Definition

Connect a bank account to QuickBooks and it starts pulling that account's transactions in automatically. Intuit describes the destination plainly: "QuickBooks sends downloaded transactions to the Pending tab, and suggests categories for each transaction." That queue was labelled For Review for years and is called Pending in current QuickBooks Online, and most bookkeepers still say For Review out of habit.

The feed is a copy of what your bank saw. That sounds obvious until you run a business on Stripe, because what your bank saw is one net lump sum on the day the payout landed. It did not see the four hundred sales inside that payout, it did not see the refunds netted against them, and it did not see the processing fees already deducted before the money left Stripe.

So the feed can tell you that $18,402.11 arrived on Tuesday. It cannot tell you what that number is made of, and no amount of categorizing in the feed will make it able to. That single limitation is the reason a Stripe workflow needs a [holding account](/glossary/holding-account) at all: the sales get recorded as they happen, into an account that stands in for the Stripe balance, and the feed line is then matched against the record of the payout that swept them.

Key points

+The stream of transactions QuickBooks downloads from a connected bank account.
+For a Stripe business it shows the payout, never a sale. The bank only saw the net lump sum.
+Fees and refunds are already netted out before the money reaches the bank, so they never appear as feed lines.
+Match links a downloaded line to a record already in your books. Add creates a brand new transaction from it.
+Clicking Add on a Stripe payout books the revenue a second time, as a lump deposit.
+The feed runs between your bank and QuickBooks. Acodei never touches it; its records are what the feed lines get matched against.

What the feed can see, and what it cannot

A bank feed reports bank events, and a Stripe payout is one bank event no matter how much activity it represents.

Three things follow from that, and each one trips somebody up.

**The amount is net, not gross.** Stripe deducts its processing fees before paying out, so the figure in the feed is already reduced by fees you still need to record as an expense. Booking the feed amount as revenue understates your income and hides the fee entirely.

**The date is the payout date, not the sale date.** A sale made on the 29th can arrive in a payout dated the 2nd. If you let the feed date your revenue, you move income across a period boundary every month end.

**Refunds and disputes are invisible.** They reduce the payout rather than appearing as their own lines, so a week with heavy refunds simply produces a smaller deposit with nothing explaining why.

None of this is a defect in the feed. It is doing its job, which is to tell you what hit the bank. The detail has to come from somewhere else, and the feed is where the two views get reconciled rather than where either one originates.

Match and Add are not two ways of doing the same thing

This is the single most consequential decision in the feed, and the labels do not advertise how different the two are.

**Match** links the downloaded bank line to a transaction QuickBooks already has. Intuit describes the prompt you see when this is available: "The transaction already exists in QuickBooks, you may have the option to match or view multiple matches." Nothing new is created. The existing record is simply marked as the thing that hit the bank, and QuickBooks will suggest matches with the same amount inside a limited date range.

**Add** does the opposite. It creates a brand new transaction from the bank's information and posts it wherever you categorize it. That is exactly right for a bank line with no counterpart in your books, such as a bank fee, and exactly wrong for a Stripe payout.

The reason is arithmetic. If your sales are already in QuickBooks, the revenue inside that payout is already recorded. Clicking Add books it a second time as a single lump deposit categorized to income, and your books now show the same money twice: once as sales detail, once as a deposit. Our guide to [Stripe QuickBooks duplicate transactions](/blog/stripe-quickbooks-duplicate-transactions) treats this as the first and most common source of duplicates and walks through the cleanup.

One practical tell is worth internalizing. On a Stripe payout, being offered Add instead of a suggested match is information rather than an invitation. It usually means the payout record is missing, or its amount or date does not line up closely enough for QuickBooks to see the connection.

**Bank rules** sit on top of all of this. Intuit lets you "create a bank rule that automatically categorizes transactions for you", which is genuinely useful for recurring costs. Pointing one at Stripe payouts is not, because a rule categorizes and a payout needs matching.

What the feed line gets matched against depends on your setup

The payout line in the feed is the same either way. What sits on the other side of the match is not, and it follows from your holding account mode.

**With Undeposited Funds**, the payout is recorded as an itemized [Deposit](/glossary/quickbooks-bank-deposit). That Deposit matches the bank line and shows its own composition, because the individual charges, refunds and fees are listed on the record itself. The feed match and the detail live in the same place.

**With a regular asset clearing account**, the payout is recorded as a single [Transfer](/glossary/quickbooks-transfer) for the net amount. The Transfer matches the bank line, and the composition lives on the sales records that posted into the clearing account rather than on the payout record.

That difference decides how much reconciliation work the feed is doing for you. Under Undeposited Funds the feed match is the checkpoint: you confirm each payout matched and the bank amount is right, and that is the end of it. With a clearing account you get a second, stronger check that does not involve the feed at all, because the clearing balance can be compared against the Stripe balance directly, daily if you want it.

Either way the [payout](/glossary/stripe-payout) is what the feed line is about, and the [full reconciliation method](/blog/stripe-payout-reconciliation-quickbooks-complete-guide) covers how to tie a month of them out.

Where Acodei sits relative to the bank feed

Acodei does not read, write to, or categorize your bank feed. The feed is a connection between your bank and QuickBooks, and nothing in a Stripe sync participates in it. What Acodei does is write the records that the feed lines get matched against, which is a different job and the reason the two never conflict.

**On a non-UF setup**, each payout becomes a single QuickBooks Transfer from the holding account to the mapped deposit bank account, for the payout's net amount. That Transfer is what the downloaded payout line matches.

**On an Undeposited Funds setup**, each payout becomes a QuickBooks Deposit itemizing the underlying charges, refunds, fees and mapped uncommon transaction types out of Undeposited Funds and into the bank account. That Deposit is what the downloaded line matches, and it carries its composition with it.

**The reconciliation method differs with the mode, and this is where the feed's role changes.** On Undeposited Funds the supported approach is payout matching only: match each payout Deposit against the bank feed, then reconcile the bank account, and that is the end of the reconciliation work. Acodei does not support balance-reconciling the Undeposited Funds account itself, because sales sit in it until a payout sweeps them and some items are only added at deposit time, so a point-in-time UF balance can legitimately disagree with the Stripe balance.

On a non-UF clearing account the method is balance reconciliation instead: the QuickBooks clearing balance should equal the Stripe balance, comparing them daily is the gold standard, and monthly is the minimum. That is why a clearing account is recommended for more complicated accounts. Drift shows up within a day rather than staying invisible between payouts.

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Frequently asked questions

What is a bank feed in QuickBooks?

It is the stream of transactions QuickBooks downloads automatically from a bank account you have connected. Intuit sends those downloaded transactions to a review queue, labelled Pending in current QuickBooks Online and known for years as the For Review tab, where each one is either matched to a record you already have or added as a new transaction.

Why does my bank feed only show Stripe payouts and not individual sales?

Because the feed reports what your bank saw, and your bank only saw the payout. Stripe batches the sales, nets out refunds and deducts its fees before transferring one lump sum, so the individual charges never reach your bank account and cannot appear as feed lines. The sales detail has to be recorded separately, which is what a holding account is for.

Should I click Match or Add on a Stripe deposit?

Match, essentially always. Match links the bank line to the payout record already in your books, so nothing new is created. Add creates a brand new transaction from the bank line, which means the revenue inside that payout gets recorded a second time as a lump deposit. If QuickBooks is offering Add rather than a suggested match, treat that as a sign the payout record is missing or its amount or date does not line up.

Does Acodei use or categorize the bank feed?

No. The bank feed runs between your bank and QuickBooks, and Acodei has no part in it. Acodei writes the QuickBooks records that your feed lines are matched against: a Transfer from the holding account on a non-UF setup, or an itemized Deposit out of Undeposited Funds on a UF setup.

Can I use a bank rule for Stripe payouts?

It is not the right tool. Bank rules automatically categorize transactions, which is useful for recurring costs like a monthly software charge. A Stripe payout does not need categorizing, it needs matching to a record that already exists, and a rule that categorizes it will create the duplicate you were trying to avoid.

Why does the bank feed amount not match my Stripe sales for the day?

Three reasons, usually together. The payout is net of Stripe fees, so it is smaller than gross revenue. Refunds and disputes reduce it without appearing as separate lines. And the payout date is not the sale date, so a payout routinely contains sales from earlier days. Comparing a feed line to a day of sales will not tie out, which is why reconciliation runs through the holding account rather than through the feed.

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