Home › Comparisons › Bank feeds vs statement conversion
Connected bank feeds are the right default for current bookkeeping. Statement conversion exists for everything feeds cannot do — and knowing the boundary saves cleanup engagements.
A bank feed delivers transactions automatically into QuickBooks or Xero, with bank-side identifiers that help the software avoid duplicates. For an active business on current books, nothing about conversion competes with that, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
But feeds have hard edges. They typically reach back only a limited window when first connected. They drop transactions, disconnect, and deliver nothing at all for closed accounts, prior software, or the client who arrives with three years of PDFs and no logins. Conversion is the tool for the territory beyond the feed's edge — and the two combine: convert the history, then let the feed run from the seam.
Best for: Ongoing, current bookkeeping for connected accounts.
Watch out: Limited history on first connection, occasional gaps and duplicates, and nothing for closed accounts or PDF-only clients.
Best for: History, cleanup and catch-up: any period the feed does not cover, from the statements themselves.
Watch out: A file-based process: statements must be collected, converted and imported in order, month by month.
The seam is where engagements are won or lost. Import converted history oldest-first, reconcile each month, and set the feed's start to the day after the last converted statement — overlap the seam and you manufacture duplicates; gap it and you lose transactions. Both tools then do what each does best.
One more asymmetry worth knowing: the statement is the document of record. When feed data and the statement disagree, the statement wins — which is why converted history, being built from statements, reconciles so cleanly.
Only if the cleanup window sits inside the feed's history and the client can connect the accounts. Most cleanups start before that window or involve closed accounts — that is conversion territory.
Yes, especially around reconnections and overlapping manual uploads. The fix is the same as for files: compare against the statement and remove the duplicated lines.
Where the statement prints opening and closing (or running) balances, the converter adds up the extracted transactions and compares the result with the statement itself. If the numbers do not tie, the conversion is flagged and the mismatched rows are marked — a failed check is never shown as a success.
No. Uploaded files and generated exports are stored only briefly to complete the download and are automatically deleted within 15 minutes.
Your first conversion is free — no card, no sign-up — and every result is reconciled against the statement itself before you download it.