When it comes to cloud accounting, many small businesses, bookkeepers and accountants will tell you that setting up automated bank feeds is one of the fundamental steps to building efficient bookkeeping processes. As an account manager, I have time and again seen this functionality at the top of accountancy practices’ wishlists, when in search of an accounting solution.
We’re proud to have been the first to support automatic bank feeds
Clear Books was the first UK based online accounting system to support automatic bank feeds way back in 2011! With our move to a new provider in February this year, bank feeds set up through Clear Books are now more stable, secure, and offer feeds with a much greater selection of banking institutions than ever before.
Security vs Efficiency
As many of you will know, this change in provider came into play alongside new Open Banking legislation. While speaking with Clear Books partners in the months following the start of Open Banking, many raised concerns that the new security restrictions, which now require feed re-authentication every 90 days, would be a direct trade-off for the ease and efficiency automatic feeds are known to provide. Indeed for growing practices, it can become difficult to keep up with clients who have feeds expiring and ensuring those clients re-authenticate with their bank before there is a disruption to the automated feed. Particularly, if clients only engage with their accounting solution once or twice a month.
With this in mind, we are delighted to announce our improvement to the ‘Client Overview’ page in the partner area, that’s here to help you!
Monitor your clients’ bank feeds with ease
Ordered by level of priority, you’ll be able to see the status of each clients’ feeds as follows:
- Connected – This account has an active feed which is linked and functional between your clients’ bank accounts and Clear Books.
- Expires in XX days – This account has a feed which will soon expire. Your client should log in and re-authenticate their feed before time runs out to prevent any disruption to the feed.
- Expired – This account has a feed which has now expired, or has been disconnected and is no longer importing transactions. Ask your client to log in and re-authenticate their feed to get back up and running.
If you have clients with multiple feeds, you’ll see one status for each client account, this status will reflect the feed that requires the most urgent attention.
No bank feeds?
We’ve got a number of resources which will help you to introduce automated bank feeds to your clients and guide them through the simple set up:
Need any help or have any further questions?
If you have questions or need help using any of our features, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
