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Setting up Bank Rules Effectively

By Lauretta Finis

Published on June 6, 20244 min read

You have been using bank rules for a while, but are you using them effectively to get the most out of the bank rules and online banking feed features?

The online banking feeds feature is quite simple to use. It intuitively remembers changes you have made for a certain supplier or customer. Based on previously chosen accounts and GST codes, it applies any new feeds to the previous chosen data.

Now that’s great, but what if you have similar suppliers each month that you may need to change each time they come through? You may have to split the transaction to part business and part personal. This is where bank rules can be used to apply a much greater level of control.

Find Rules and Set Them Up

Left hand side navigation bar >Transactions > Banking > File upload drop down menu > Manage Rules.

Let’s look at some examples and various set ups in bank rules.

On a weekly basis your office staff purchase supplies from Officeworks and purchases are normally around $100 to $200. Occasionally you might purchase new printers from the same supplier. These purchases over $400 would not go to office supplies but would be categorised as Assets < $1000 purchases using bank rules. See the example below

Fuel purchases: you always purchase $60 each week and the remainder goes to Drawings because you may purchase water or food at the Fuel outlet. You can split this transaction using bank rules
Fuel purchases you may make all over the state of Victoria: set up bank rules to allocate AA Safeway, Caltex, Shell to the supplier name Fuel Various and account Motor Vehicle Fuel
Bank fees: each month on the 15th you get charged a $25 monthly bank fee and variable amount for interest. Use a bank rule to split these amounts to the appropriate accounts
Bills: the Telstra bill is the same monthly amount of amount $450.00. Bank rules can split up various accounts, for example $250.00 for Telephone, $100.00 for Internet and $100.00 for Mobile. Don’t forget, if you have your classes set up you can also set these up as bank rules. See the example below

Loan accounts: you may have one amount coming out as a direct debit from your bank Loan accounts but need to split this between the three directors of the business
Description in your bank feed may come through as ABC Pty Ltd, but the business name is Golden Leaf Gardening Service. Set the supplier name to Golden Leaf Gardening Service and account to Maintenance. However, half of this could be your business portion and the other half personal. This needs to be split between Repairs and Maintenance and Owner’s Drawings. See the example below

Deposits coming in from a separate software with coding for a particular income account: this can be set up via Bank Rules to deposit money to correct income account

For example, we have a beauty salon using a third party software app connected to QBO. Deposit details come into the bank feeds as:

ANZ EFTPOS WAXING: this would go to the Waxing Income account
ANZ EFTPOS FACIAL: this would go to Facial Income account
Set up in Bank Rule’s for waxing service income could be:

Rule Name: ANZ Waxing
Money in
Westpac chq Account: from the drop down menu you can choose one or ALL bank accounts
Set up the condition in this instance: Description contains ANZ EFTPOS WAXING in the online bank feeds
Transaction Type from drop down menu: Deposit
Payee: Waxing Sales
Category account: Waxing Income
Tax Code: GST

As you can see there are countless number of reasons why you would use Bank Rules. You can set up bank rules in your business to be able to allocate expenses and deposits more easily from your online banking feeds, saving a lot of time so you can concentrate on what you do best!

Adding Rule Transactions to Online Bank Feeds

Once the bank rules are set up it is easy to capture the rule and add to QuickBooks Online. See the below example rule for ATM deposits to be posted to Sales of Product Income including GST.

Rule Set Up

When the transaction comes through you can click on any transaction to open it and see more detail. This transaction has picked up the Rule Applied ATM Deposits.

The ATM deposits transactions rule has been applied and it is as easy as ticking the transaction on the left hand side. Click Batch Actions > Accept Selected and all three transactions can be added in one click.

Bank Rules can help you manage your banking effectively, so take advantage of the rules feature and tailor them to suit your transactions as they come in. As the example above shows there are three deposits and only three clicks. These deposits are now waiting for the next step: bank reconciliations.

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