Bank feeds are a game-changer for businesses selling online. Together, Xero and Pin Payments are giving more businesses easier payment reconciling.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of doing business, accepting payments online has become not only a convenience but a necessity for success. As online transactions surge, businesses must adapt to use more efficient tools to free up their time to focus, and stay competitive.

When using an online payment provider, you’ll typically receive a single daily lump sum transfer into their bank account, for the total of all transactions on a day. Xero launching its Bank Feed API in recent years has enabled online payment providers to build their own bank feed to help their customers with reconciling, and win back time to focus on their business.‍

What is a bank feed?‍

Bank feeds are great because they automatically import transactions from your bank or financial institution into your Xero organisation. This eliminates the need to import transactions manually. You can match these imported bank transactions against your Xero transactions to complete your reconciliation.

Using the bank feed is especially helpful if your business spends a lot of time on manual reconciliation. When you run your own business, having that extra time to focus on other areas is always beneficial. Using a bank feed helps automate large sections of manual bookkeeping and will help your business’ efficiency and productivity. ‍

What are the benefits?

1. Streamline reconciling‍

With all the information you need in the one place, you won’t have to switch between applications to reconcile payments from your payments provider. ‍

2. Saves you time, helps you scale‍

Just because your business is growing, doesn’t mean your reconciling work has to. Leverage Xero’s Find and Match tool to automate the reconciling process and save yourself time on bookkeeping. ‍

3. Keep your financial position current‍

When your accounts are up-to-date, you’ll make better business decisions. Bank feeds help you get ahead in your bookkeeping by enabling more regular reconciling.‍

Select a payment provider that offers a bank feed‍

Your first step to easy reconciling is finding a payment platform integrated with Xero, such as Pin Payments. Most payment providers who offer a bank feed can be found on Xero’s App Store.

So what does it look like in action? After enabling a bank feed, individual transactions, transaction fees and transaction fee reimbursements (where surcharging is used) will appear in your bank feed in Xero as separate bank statement lines. You can then reconcile each bank statement line against the corresponding Xero transactions with one click.