QuickBooks Bank Feed Not Working: What to Do
Most broken feeds are one of four things, and only one of them is worth spending an afternoon on. Work out which before you start disconnecting accounts: reconnecting is the fix people reach for first and it is the one most likely to make a mess.
Published 9 August 2026 · 7 min read
The short answer
Refresh once and wait a day. If nothing arrives, log in to the bank's own website and look for something a person has to click. That single step explains more stalled feeds than everything else combined.
Do not disconnect the account as a first move. Reconnecting can re-import transactions you have already categorised, and untangling that takes longer than the original problem.
First, work out which failure this is
The symptoms look alike from the QuickBooks side, and the causes have almost nothing in common.
| Symptom | Usually means |
|---|---|
| An error code on the account tile | The bank refused or changed the connection |
| No error, but no new transactions for days | A silent stall: common, and often fixed by one manual refresh |
| Transactions stop at a specific date | The connection broke that day, typically a credential or consent change |
| Some accounts update, others do not | One account's authorisation lapsed, not the whole connection |
| Transactions arrive but are wrong or duplicated | Not a connection problem at all: see below |
The fourth row catches people out. Several accounts at one bank are frequently separate authorisations behind a single login, so a working current account tells you nothing about a savings account that has quietly stopped.
Refresh manually, then wait a day
Use Update on the banking screen and give it a few minutes. A surprising share of stalled feeds clear on their own: the connection is fine and a single scheduled refresh was missed.
If nothing arrives, wait a full day before escalating. Bank-side maintenance is routine, usually overnight, and often resolves without anyone doing anything. Two manual refreshes a day apart, both producing nothing, is a reasonable point to start investigating.
Log in to the bank directly
This is the highest-value diagnostic and the one most often skipped. Open the bank's own website in a browser and sign in as yourself.
What you are looking for is anything that interrupts a normal login: a message to acknowledge, new terms to accept, a security question, an expired password, a marketing interstitial, a prompt to confirm your phone number. An automated connection cannot dismiss any of those, so it stalls silently until a human clears it.
If the bank made you click something to reach your accounts, that was almost certainly the cause. Refresh the feed once you are through and it will usually resume on its own.
It is worth doing this on the actual bank site rather than an app, because the interstitials that break connections tend to be web-side.
Check whether consent expired
Many banks grant account access for a fixed period and then require you to re-authorise, and under UK and EU open banking rules all of them do. Ninety days is the common figure. When it lapses the feed simply stops, often with no warning on the QuickBooks side at all.
The renewal is usually done inside the bank's own site, under a section named something like third-party access, connected apps or account permissions, rather than anywhere in QuickBooks. It is a two-minute job once you know where it lives, and it will need doing again in another ninety days.
If your feeds break on a rough quarterly rhythm and always resume after a re-authorisation, this is what is happening, and it is worth putting a reminder in the calendar rather than rediscovering it each time.
Update the connection, not the account
If the first three turn up nothing, use the account's Edit sign-in info or Update credentials option. That re-authenticates without discarding the existing link and without re-importing history: it is the safe version of reconnecting.
This is the step that fixes a changed password, and it is worth trying even when you are confident nothing changed, because a forced password reset by the bank looks identical from here.
Disconnecting, and what it costs
Full disconnect and reconnect is the last resort rather than the first move, because it frequently re-delivers up to ninety days of history you have already dealt with.
If you are going to do it, spend ten minutes first:
- Clear the For review queue: categorise or exclude everything sitting in it.
- Note the date of the most recent transaction that came through, so you know what a duplicate looks like.
- Reconnect, and let it pull whatever it pulls.
- Exclude anything that reappears rather than deleting it, so the originals keep their categorisation and their links to anything already reconciled.
When it is not going to be fixed
Some feeds stay broken, and it is worth recognising that early rather than losing a week to it.
- The bank changed provider. Connections are rebuilt on the aggregator's timetable, not yours, and it can take weeks with no useful status page to watch.
- The account type is not covered. Business, trust, savings and card accounts at the same bank are frequently separate connections, and not all of them are supported.
- The institution offers no feed at all. Plenty of business banking platforms never did, and connect only through an aggregated route with no downloadable file behind it either.
In all three cases the answer is the same, and it is the one bookkeepers used long before feeds existed: export the statement and upload it.
Closing the month while it is broken
The month has to close whether or not the connection comes back. Every bank offering online access offers an export, usually CSV and sometimes a spreadsheet, and that export holds the same transactions the feed would have delivered.
It has one advantage over the feed, too: no ninety-day history limit. If the connection has been down for four months, one export covers all of it, where a repaired feed would only reach back through the most recent stretch and leave you doing this anyway for the rest.
The manual version is straightforward. Export the widest date range the bank allows, open it in a spreadsheet, strip any header and totals rows, keep the date, description and amount columns, make sure no amount carries a thousands separator, and save it as CSV for the upload screen.
If you would rather not do that by hand each time, converting the export here does the same tidying and totals every transaction against the closing balance so you can see nothing was dropped. It runs in your browser, so a client's transaction history never leaves your machine, and it does not categorise anything: that stays your job either way.
Convert a statement exportIf transactions arrive but are wrong
This is a different problem wearing the same clothes, and reconnecting will not touch it.
- Duplicates after a reconnect. The feed re-delivered history you already had. Exclude rather than delete, so the originals keep their categorisation.
- A single missing transaction. Often one of a same-day pair with matching amounts, where one was treated as a repeat of the other.
- Balances that disagree with the bank. Check whether pending transactions are counted on one side and not the other before assuming anything was lost.
- Descriptions that are truncated or unfamiliar. These are normal. Statement descriptions pass through several systems with fixed field widths, and each one shortens them.
Reducing how often it happens
Feeds break. Nothing here prevents that, but a few habits make it cost less when it does.
- Log in to each bank directly every month or so, even when everything looks fine, so a waiting interstitial gets cleared before it stops anything.
- Note when each connection was authorised, if the bank works on fixed consent periods, and renew before it lapses rather than after.
- Do not leave the review queue full. A backlog is what turns a routine reconnect into an afternoon of untangling duplicates.
- Check the feed reached the end of the month before closing it, rather than assuming silence means nothing happened.
Frequently asked questions
Why do bank feeds keep disconnecting? Usually because the bank changed something: a security prompt, new terms, a password policy, or an access authorisation that expired. Connections are made by automated login, and anything requiring a human to click through will stop one until a human does.
How long should I wait before assuming it is broken? A full day. Bank-side maintenance is routine and often overnight. If two manual refreshes a day apart both produce nothing, it is worth investigating rather than waiting further.
Will reconnecting duplicate my transactions? It can. A reconnect frequently re-delivers up to ninety days of history, and anything already categorised will come back as a duplicate. Clear the review queue first, and exclude rather than delete anything that does reappear.
Why does one account update and another at the same bank does not? Because they are often separate authorisations behind a single login. Business, savings and card accounts are frequently connected independently of the current account, so one can lapse while the others keep working.
Can I keep working while the feed is down? Yes, and this is what file uploads are for. Export the statement from the bank, convert it to a format the upload screen takes, and carry on. It also gets round the roughly ninety-day history limit a fresh connection has.
Should I contact QuickBooks support or my bank? The bank first, in most cases. QuickBooks support can confirm whether a connection is failing but cannot clear a security prompt, renew a consent or fix a credential on the bank's side, which is where the great majority of these problems actually live.