A closer look at the new QuickBooks bank feed and Accounting Agent

Every fall at Intuit Connect, we highlight the new features and innovations we’re bringing to the platform. And every year the sentiment from the accountant community is excitement mixed with a request: “Bring that same kind of innovation in the core product.”

Last fall, we listened. We declared on the mainstage that we were on a mission to co-create the future of accounting with accountants, for accountants. Since that time, we’ve been working together to make QuickBooks more powerful, more intuitive, and AI-native. Our goal is clear—to dramatically increase your efficiency so you can focus on what matters most: serving your clients and growing your practice.

This is an audacious goal and change can be hard. The muscle memory you’ve built with your tech stack over years is critical to serving clients, and any shift in your core workflow needs to be worth the effort.

So we’re going to take you on a tour of the nuts and bolts of the new QuickBooks bank feed so you can consider it for your firm’s workflow. We’ve conducted comprehensive customer testing for almost a year with more than 65,000 accountants and small business owners in our beta program to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback on the experience. 

While we recognize there's still room for improvement, the majority of firms who tried it reported increased efficiency. In fact, 80% of those who had early access said it makes handling transactions easier than before, and 45% of them said they’re already saving 12 hours per month.¹ 

If it’s not quite there yet for your firm, that’s OK—just keep the feedback coming. We’re committed to the challenge of winning you over. 

Let's dive in.

Our goals for the new bank feed

Accountants have told us they spend a significant amount of time in the bank feed posting transactions to the books for their clients, and this process is often manual and tedious, taking valuable time away from being able to perform other value-added activities for their clients. The goal of this bank feed redesign is to help accountants become more efficient when performing these tasks. The new bank feed enables this efficiency through:

• “Inline editable” fields for category, vendor, class, location, and product/service, so that you do not need to open up an overlay to edit and post transactions.
• The full bank description can be viewed by hovering over the bank description field instead of having to open the overlay.
• Suggestions for categorization that are more accurate than the category suggestions on the previous bank feed page, as they leverage and continue learning from details from the full bank description and your transaction history from similar vendors.
• Suggestions for matching that can handle more complex 1:many matches that the old bank feed did not support.
• Suggestions for payee, with the ability to add a new payee directly from the editable drop-down box without leaving the bank feed.
• Explanations for each payee, category, and matching suggestion to provide full transparency on why each suggestion was made. For example, the explanation will include examples of previous transactions you categorized for this vendor.
• Maintaining all the capabilities of the old bank feed, including the ability to create rules, view categorization history, split transactions, exclude transactions, mark transactions as transfers or credit card payments, add or remove columns, resize columns, and group transactions.

Getting grounded: What’s new and where to find it

Let's get oriented. The experience has been redesigned to be more efficient. As a result, some familiar features have a new home. This video walks you through where to find the tools you rely on every day.

Let’s take a look specifically at where the new bank feed features are located and their function.

Supercharging your workflow with an AI-powered bank feed

The new, AI-powered bank feed is designed to be a learning partner. In the previous version of the bank feed, we used a machine learning-based model to offer categorization and matching suggestions. After over a year of fine-tuning and testing across tens of millions of transactions, we found that in our testing, the AI-based model has consistently demonstrated higher accuracy suggestions compared to the machine learning model. The AI-based models are able to co-relate similar vendors that are not exactly the same, as well as identify matches that might not have the exact same amount.  

We’ve heard from accountants that the new AI engine’s accuracy and the ability to explain why it’s making a suggestion are massive confidence boosters, even in cases where they disagreed with the suggestion. Seeing the explanations for why the model suggested a category, match, or payee provides much needed transparency.

Accountants maintain control of their clients’ books and can decide to leverage as much or as little of the AI in the bank feed as needed.

This video dives deep into these changes. We'll show you how the improved matching and categorization engine learns from your actions to save you time on every single client file.

A closer look at the new Accounting Agent

The Accounting Agent includes several new features firms can utilize to assist with their workflows.

PDF Uploads for bank statements

QuickBooks Online users can now upload a bank or credit card statement in PDF, JPG, or PNG format, and the Accounting Agent will extract the transactions and present the transactions to the user to confirm before they are added to the bank feed. In cases where our technology cannot extract the transactions correctly, we will send the statement for our human reviewers to review and correct any extraction errors. We know most clients send their statements in PDF form, which is much easier than training them on how to download a CSV file from the bank's website, although that's still available.

Context gathering and collaboration

We know that accountants often spend considerable time asking their clients for more information on transactions so they can be posted to the books. For clients on QuickBooks Online Essentials and above plans, the Accounting Agent now enables accountants to request information from clients on transactions directly from QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Online Accountant, with an AI-enabled capability that helps gather the requested information from the client. The record of the conversation between accountant and client is captured and stored to the transaction, so the accountant can easily access this history at a later date. And the category and matching suggestions automatically update to include the additional context gathered from the client.

Ready to post transactions

When you are faced with a wall of transactions, it is hard to know which are the easy ones that you can post quickly and which ones need more attention. The new “Ready to Post” feature separates out transactions that have a known vendor from your vendor list, and where the category suggestion is based on similar transactions in your history. This helps you get through a large number of transactions at a glance, so you can focus your time on the ones that need your attention. Later, this feature will be enhanced with the ability for you to specify your personal preference on which type of transactions you want to review further and keep out of the “Ready to Post” set. You’ll see the notification for this feature if your client file has a large amount of historical data.

Anomaly detection

The Accounting Agent is able to help identify potential errors or miscategorization in the books for Accountants to review. For clients on QuickBooks Online Plus and above plans, the Accounting Agent can surface potential accounting anomalies on the Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss reports. These potential anomalies are surfaced with detailed explanations on which transactions were the cause of those anomalies, enabling easy investigation. You remain in control on whether to act on the potential anomaly. We’ve heard from many of our early adopters of this experience that it is saving them significant time by surfacing these areas to investigate before closing the books.

Bank reconciliation

The Accounting Agent also offers an enhanced reconciliation experience for clients on QuickBooks Online Plus and above plans. The Accounting Agent will take an uploaded bank statement, extract the individual transactions, compare those transactions to what’s already in the books in QuickBooks Online, as well as the bank transactions that came in through the feed. The agent will highlight discrepancies that need to be addressed by doing a three-way comparison against the data sets, along with suggestions on how to address them in order to complete the reconciliation. This feature is optional, and accountants are welcome to either use this new reconciliation experience or continue using the existing reconciliation experience if they choose.

Access the new features

You'll temporarily be able to opt your clients in or out of the new user interface at the individual client level (in your client books) or opt all your clients in or out at the bulk client level. If now isn’t the best time, you can opt out your clients temporarily. By the end of September, any client you’ve opted out will automatically be opted back into the new experience because the classic QuickBooks experience will no longer be supported.

To bulk in/opt your clients:

• In QuickBooks Online Accountant, go to Settings via the gear icon.
• Click on Choose Client Version.

How we are responding to your feedback

We appreciate the feedback we’ve received so far from the accountant community—and take it seriously. We have already launched some improvements this week to readability and match indicators, and you will continue to see more updates based on your feedback in the next few weeks as we continue to listen. We’d also like to emphasize that we have not taken away functionality from the previous bank feed— features such as categorization history, splits, and transfers remain readily accessible in the new experience.

Here is how to best send us your feedback on the new QuickBooks experience. If you are leaving feedback on a certain part of the new experience, please be sure to include the specific area such as bank feeds or Accounting Agent in your comment. This helps ensure we route your feedback to the correct team. 

For those who have opted out of the new experience, we urge you to give it a shot. Try it for one client for a month or two to see if you get the same efficiency gains as the 65,000 folks from our early access program.

For more in-depth information on the new QuickBooks bank feeds and the accounting agent register for our upcoming In the Know webinar, July 17 at 2 PM ET. And listen to the latest On the Books episode as I discuss the Accounting Agent. 

Disclaimers

¹Based on a survey commissioned by Intuit of QuickBooks Online customers using Intuit Assist as of March/April 2025.