Thank you for the prompt reply. I'm here to help you out with creating bank rules in QuickBooks Online (QBO), @Arrow98.

Bank rules in QBO can automatically categorize or add transactions with a custom set of conditions. Taking the sample bank transaction you provided above, follow these steps below to create a bank rule for it:

1. Highlight the Banking tab, then select Rules.
2. Click the New rule button.
3. Enter a name for this rule, set Money in, then All bank accounts.
4. Choose the next drop-down menu to Any. 
5. Set Description, Contains, then Smith.
6. Add another line and set Description, Contains, then 123.

At this point, you'll get this screenshot on your end:

The rest of the options at the bottom of  this window depends on you. It's where you enter the transaction type, category, payee, and tags. As I stated above, these rules allow you to categorize or automatically add transactions. The option to automatically match an online bank feed to a transaction in QBO is unavailable. Open this article for additional information about this feature: Set up bank rules to categorize online banking transactions in QuickBooks Online. 

You can also view this article for a detailed guide on how to match your downloaded bank transactions: Categorize and match online bank transactions in QuickBooks Online.

Don't hesitate to tag me in a comment below if you have other questions about bank rules in QBO. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Have a great day!

Thank you Ryan for the quick reply!   Yes, your rule is exactly like what I have done.  But.... it doesn't work on the actual bank feed. 

Is there a way to test this rule outside of waiting for an actual transaction to come in on the feed?

Let's make sure you'll be able to test a rule and check if it does match the transactions, Arrow98.

 It's a great way to dive in and experiment with features and options you might not feel comfortable trying in your own QuickBooks Online account. You can use our test drive so you can test certain things such as creating the bank rule.  

You can manually enter older transactions and use them while working with your test drive. Also, you can create your own bank account for testing. 

In addition, QuickBooks downloads the latest bank transactions automatically and tries to match them with what you've entered in QuickBooks. For your reference, I've added this article for your guide: Categorize And Match Online Bank Transactions In QuickBooks Online.

Please touch base with us if there's anything else you need with the bank rule. Don't forget, we're here to help you as always. 

Thank you Maria for letting me know how to test banking rules without affecting my live data.  I will explore this function and report back late next week. 

Cheers.

Hi Ryan and Maria,

Not good news.  The rules still don't work.  I actually deleted all of my rules, cleared the cache and reentered them.  I got a different rule for each client.  Some the same as you suggested Ryan.  When this months live bank feed data came in a few days ago it was a perfect live test.  Nothing. 

QBO would not find any sort of match--not even wrong one.  It just returned the same name to in the match field for all my clients ACH bank feed.  When I click on Find More Matches which brings up a dropdown menu list of other potential client matches none of them remotely come close to matching the feed to a client.

Again here is my bank feed data:

Mar 4, 2020 Online ACH Debit [removed] From Smith 1162 ( #####123) ACH Collection $25.00

Seriously, there is a bug in the software.  It would so nice if you both could use your influence and get in touch with the actual software engineering team and alert them.  I would be happy to work with them and be a beta tester. 

Good afternoon, @Arrow98. 

Thanks for joining back in on this thread. Allow me to share some insight with you. 

The best route for you, at the moment, would be to contact our Customer Support Team again. They'll be able to escalate the issue to our Product Engineers. Use the link provided to get in touch with them. 

If you have any other questions or concerns, don't hesitate to ask. I'm always here to lend a helping hand. Have a wonderful day!

Hi Candice,

I appreciate your suggestions.  However, my first post here on this thread indicated that I have already opened a case in 2019 ( still open? ) which was supposed to catch the eye of the engineering team.  But I have had zero response.  I have spent h- o- u- r- s on the phone with your tech support to no avail.  You guys here are great to provide links to articles but --- there is a software bug and I can't seem to get anyone higher up the food chain to listen. 

I simply have found a software problem and would like to work with you to fix it.  How can I get in touch with someone in the engineering team? 

Thank you.

Morning,

So far there have been 8 QB employees and 1 moderator that have offered on line help in this thread.  Not only my issue still not resolved but several other posters as well.  

This should be enough evidence for the QB employees monitoring this forum to bring to a higher supervisor there is a problem and you have unhappy customers.

Rather than point me to another link or have me call general tech support, can one of the Intuit employees here personally take ownership of my issue and hand carry it to someone that can actually get in touch with the programmers and post here with the progress.   Please.

Again, I want to help too.  I am not here to bash.   Thank you.

Hello, Arrow98. 

We would like to get to this bottom of this and fix the bank rules issue. I also sincerely appreciate your initiative to help on the issue on behalf of the other users here.  

I would like to personally bring the engineers over for updates or details about the bank feeds issue. However, they don't have access to this forum. One way to have them work on the issue is to contact our support agents, and they will coordinate with the engineers and let them check and work on the bank rules system. 

Our support agents will create an investigation regarding the bank rules, and our engineers will work on it to fix it. Though, you can also request for a supervisor as soon as you get in touch with an agent. 

Since you have an existing case (back in 2019 and possibly on this year), you can let our support people check the notes. 

Use the same phone number or you can follow the instructions provided by my colleagues on the previous replies. 

If you haven't already done it yet, you can manually match or categorize those open invoices with the ACH payments in the meantime. 

If you'd like to reconcile your books after manually categorizing your transactions, you can check this article for a guide: Reconcile an account in QuickBooks Online.

I thank you for your time in replying to this thread. If you have any other concerns with your bank feeds transactions, I'd be more than willing to help. If you'd like to share your thoughts about QuickBooks Online, let's hear them out in your reply. 

@jamespaul - Thank you for the quick reply.  Can you confirm that all of the employees in this forum have no way of contacting engineering internally?  And my only possible hope is through a support agent. 

I appreciate your prompt reply, @Arrow98.

We can only check and post updates from our engineering team. Contacting them requires additional information to verify your account.

Since the Community is a public forum, we're not allowed to obtain sensitive information for the safety of your account. Thus, it'll be best to contact our support team. One of our live agents can securely pull up your account and have our engineers look into the issue you're having with bank rules.

Once everything is settled out, you can now seamlessly set up bank rules in QuickBooks Online (QBO).

Additionally, you might want to utilize this article for future guidance: Learn the reconcile workflow in QuickBooks. This contains details on how to efficiently match your accounts and troubleshoot them in case you've run into some issues.

If there's anything else I can help you with aside from bank rules, please feel free to tag me in your reply. I'll be here to back you up!

I am not sure why this problem hasn't been solved for so many people... 

This may have been solved elsewhere, but I just fixed it. We had updated to 2021 and all of a sudden our bank feed wouldn't automatically create rules and all of the ones we had were LOST. Here are the steps to fix it (this is for 2021 and above desktop).

Edit > Preferences > Checking > Company preferences

Go to bank feeds, and change from Advanced mode to Express  mode.

BOOM - all our rules are back. I figured this out browsing the web on my own and trying things. I called QB support, got the run around constantly, and have probably spent 10 plus hours on the phone to resolve this. Numerous escalations and ZERO help from them.

Hopefully this works. 

Hi,

I have had the same issue with the rules not working when they have worked for 7 years for my one business. Now none of the rules work except for when a fee from the bank comes across - so I looked at the rules again and noticed this new one at the top which I have the checkmark next to. With this rule in place it would seem it would override all the other rules - so I tried to delete it and the option to delete it is greyed out in both the drop down on the line with the rule and in the Actions menu.  I do not want this rule and I think this is causing the issue. Please help as I have a lot of data that will take hours that I wasn't planning on. THank you!

I want to ensure you can seamlessly work with your QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT) tasks, @pstahl27.

In QBDT, the Never Automatically Create Rules is a default rule that can't be deleted or modified. To isolate the issue, you can disable the auto-check status through the Preferences menu. I'm here to guide you how:

1. Navigate to the Edit menu and choose Preferences.
2. Click Checking from the left panel, and go to the Company Preferences.
3. In the Bank Feeds section, uncheck the options for Create rules automatically and Always ask before creating a rule.
4. Select OK.

I've also added this article for your reference in managing banking rules: Use renaming rules for Bank Feeds. This also provides fixes from common issues you may encounter with bank rules. 

You'll also want to reconcile your bank transactions to make sure they are accounted for correctly and ensure your books are accurate.

Click the Reply button if you need more help with deleting bank rules or any banking concerns. Take care and have a productive day.

Why hasn't this been fixed. Thanks for posting this solution. It switched me to Advanced Mode today after using 2021 for months.

To QuickBooks: Why would I want a nicer looking bank feeds section that doesn't allow rules and therefore takes me way longer to enter data. There is almost no point in linking your bank if you can create rules to memorize things for next time.

QuickBooks please fix this!!! I just made an account just to post this.

This isn't the impression we want you to have when using the bank feeds feature in QuickBooks, @Tim the Tool Man.

We can perform some steps to fix your banking rules issues. We can run a QuickBooks Tool Hub. This helps fix common errors. 

Here's how:

1. Close QBDT.
2. Download the most recent version of the QuickBooks Tool Hub. Save it somewhere you can easily find it (like your Downloads folder or your Windows desktop).
3. Open the file you downloaded (QuickBooksToolHub.exe).
4. Follow the on-screen steps to install and agree to the terms and conditions.
5. Double-click the icon on your Windows desktop to open the tool hub once the installation is complete.

Once done, we can then proceed to the steps to fix common errors by running a Quick Fix my program. QuickBooks will shut down any open background processes as a result of the Quick Fix. It will make a quick fix to your program. Let me show you how:

1. Select Program Problems from the QuickBooks Tool Hub.
2. Select Quick Fix my Program.
3. Open your data file in QuickBooks Desktop.

If issue persists, I suggest contacting our support team. They have the necessary tools to check the root cause of this issue. 

I'm also adding these articles you can utilize to manage your banking rules in QuickBooks:

• Create rules to categorize transactions in QuickBooks Desktop
• Switch between banking modes

Keep me posted on how it goes. I want to ensure this is taken care of. Stay safe!

QBs Online Advanced user here.

We have had this problem since we started using the platform 13months ago. 

Bank rules do not work. They do not "auto-add" .

We have to manually run the rule for it to work.

we even use the "test rule" feature. It then correctly processes the rule(s).

terrible support as always from QBs.

People have raised the issue countless times and QBs doesn't care. The people from QBs who respond in these threads are equivalent to bots. They do not escalate anything to people who resolve software issues. There's never real closure to anything here. It's just users raising problems and cahtbots closing threads.

good luck. 2023.

One last attempt at this.

This is the corrective narrative below BEFORE I "Create a rule"

But in "Create a rule" it truncates it at the word "shop"

Iconic Selec Ltd Cvc Shop

I cannot create rules with wrong narratives. Again, it is not the a feed issue as the bank narrative is correct UNTIL I create a rule, when the Description Contains box takes out whole phrases and words!!!

Hello Jason_Grant, thanks for posting on this thread, can you please try clearing your cache and cookies to all time, close the browser down reload it and try again see if that resolves it as there is no limits and we tested it and put around 440 characters in and it didn’t cut any of it off yet. 

Ashleigh I have tried this. Clearing cache and cookies does not help. I don't understand how widespread this is but it has happened to a number of my QBO clients, and I don't understand why the community is not in uproar about this. 

Hi there, @Jason_Grant. 

Thanks for getting back to us. 

Since you still seem to have issues after clearing the cache from your browser, I recommend contacting our Technical Support Team. This way, one of our agents can review your account in a secure environment and investigate this matter further. 

You can use the link I've included below to connect with support: 

• QuickBooks Online Support

Please keep me updated. I'm happy to lend a hand if you have any other questions or concerns. Take care! 

@Jason, the community IS in an uproar about bank rules not working.  More so we are pissed that we continue to get platitudes and never ANY communication from someone in programming.  Their phone support and moderators here don't seem to have any way to let the engineers know about these complaints.

I have spent hours experimenting, talking with dozens of phone support, here, opened tickets since 2020 and here we are.  I have offered to be a beta tester.  I'm not a person to sit here and bitch, I want to work with them and resolve it.  It WILL be a huge benefit to their customers once they decide to give this some attention.

Couldn't agree more. The intuit team is utterly useless. I'd be embarrased to work there