Coming soon: Automated Bank Imports for Expenses

Coming soon: Automated Bank Imports for Expenses – sign up to be a beta tester

by Melina Stathopoulos | October 22/2012 | bank imports, expenses

Automated Bank Imports for Expenses are coming soon in FreshBooks. In the meantime, we’re looking for people who’d like the chance to try out this feature and provide initial feedback. Bank import lets you connect a bank account or credit card to FreshBooks and have your expenses automatically downloaded daily. Alongside other recent updates in FreshBooks including new tax-friendly categories and the ability to attach expense receipts as PDFs or images to invoices, this will help make tracking your expenses even easier. Sign up below if you’d like the chance to be a beta tester and give bank imports a whirl!

Sign up here

Rich Morris

I am based in the UK and have a business account with HSBC bank.
Elizabeth Coates

Bank with HSBC in the UK.
Interested in testing,
Elizabeth
P N

Interested in the beta testing. Banking with a US based credit union that has good online access.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#casey Casey McKinnon

Hi folks,

Please do not post your info here in the Comments section… do so using the link in the blog post that says “Sign up”.

Casey
matt

Please build in some kind of check register for recording physical checks that have been written by me – then the ability to mark them as “cashed” when the recipient deposits the check. Need to be able to see what has been deposited and what is still hanging out there.
Sam

Hello!

How safe is this? Please provide more information on the how this will work.

Thanks

S
http://Www.prostarbd.com Mathew

Please provide details on the level of security for this feature. Thank you.
Brian

This would be a welcome addition, however I am extremely concerned about security.
I use a large US bank, and my info has been hacked twice through the banks firewalls.
It is very unsettling to receive a call from a bank rep requesting I come down and pick up new cards as they were hacked had to shut down accounts.
Scott

It’s more than simply importing expenses from my bank acct. It’s also a reconciliation and combining duplicate data items. For example, I try very hard to update expesnse as they happen. I capture recipts via Shoeboxed.com. I then update once a month from my bank account by importing the expenses. I then have to sort my expenses in FreshBooks by amount and comapre equal amoutns looking for duplicates. This is the problem you need to solve.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#casey Casey McKinnon

Sam, Matthew, Brian,

Regarding security… we know that your data and bank login information is extremely sensitive data, and we would not put our customers in a situation where anyone felt insecure.

Before you make any decisions to use our Bank Import service, we’ll provide full details of the security involved in this connection, and provide you with enough information to make the conscious decision yourself. Details forthcoming as we roll this out more.
http://www.certify.com Alan

Scott, that is why you need to use a system like Certify – we do that kind of thing all day long. Merging multiple sources of the same expense information from credit card transaction to receipt metadata to expense report header information, that is what is required. Perhaps some integration with Freshbooks would allow you to get the best of both worlds.
http://www.adamaston.com adam a

most of my expenses run through credit cards, visa & american express. does this trial include that functionality? i’d be keen to try if so. eager to dump quicken.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@adam a: Yes, Automated Bank Import works by pulling expenses in from bank accounts and credit cards, too!
http://wrongnotes.blogspot.com Charlie Hubbard

So there are lots of sites out there that do this, but I’ve been waiting for Freshbooks to do it. Right now all of the integration with these other sites and Freshbooks inflates the expense reporting because I enter in FB, then the site pulls it over and adds it to the total of expenses. I have to manually resolve X expense report is Y credit card transaction. It’s such a pain I don’t do it. I’d really just say W, X, Y, Z credit card transaction(s) is an expense report. Done.

Anyway the security concerns are the same though with these other sites as with Freshbooks. We just need assurances you are using minimum 128 bit encryption for all transactions, read only access, you don’t store username/passwords, bank account numbers, CC numbers are stored in a secure fashion in accordance with PCI. Essentially you have to answer these questions:

https://www.mint.com/how-it-works/security/faq/
Neville

Will this allow the report to be in a coding format from the bank into Freshbooks?
The equivalent in Australia is called Banklink coding reports. If I can do this and send to the accountant, would be great.The system learns the code for each type of expense, so after a month or two, its automatic.
http://www.thebkry.com John Ashenden

Would love to get my hands on this feature. Following a trial of Freshbooks a few months ago, we decided not to continue on with Freshbooks. The primary reason? Lack of Bank Account Reconciliation. If this works as good as I hope it does, you’ll have yourself another customer
http://www.accountantjobs.co.in/ Accountant Jobs

Provide the security features about this.
http://newwave-design.co.uk Stephen Thomas

Bank with HSBC in the UK
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@Charlie Hubbard: I hear you on the potential confusion with too many integrations. The way Automated Bank Imports works is that expense transactions found in your bank account or credit card get automatically imported as proper Expenses in FreshBooks. The idea is that you would no longer need to manually enter your expenses (or import them from elsewhere), so you would not need to deal with duplication or resolving your transactions.

Thanks for the comments about what you’re looking for regarding security concerns. We take this stuff seriously and yep–this is exactly the type of general information page we’re working on having ready as we roll this new feature out. Thank you!
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@Neville: Good question. Actually since this is Bank Import for expenses only, there is no need to code the transaction type–they are all simply ‘Expenses’ in FreshBooks like the ones you might manually enter yourself. At the end of the year, you can generate an Expense Report in FreshBooks (which includes information about all of the expenses you incurred during a given period) and hand that off to your accountant. I hope this helps.
ash

look forward to the invitation to test…
http://wwash.org Joao Amado

hi,
We would be happy if it simply imported excel file that we download from the online banking (more secure them this is impossible).
Of cource that if you import it automaticly from accessing the bank account it would be perfect, but before you start working with Portuguese banks, I better wait sitting down
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@Joao Amada: Thanks for your comment. You actually can do this already! You can import a CSV/Excel, QBO or OFX file of your expense into FreshBooks by going to the Expenses tab and clicking the “File Import” subtab. Check out this FAQ for more info: http://community.freshbooks.com/support/can-i-import-expenses/
Hope this helps!
http://www.inkgraphix.com Mattias

I guess this feature is just for US for now right? Otherwise Im willing to beta test for Nordea bank in Sweden.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@Mattias Thanks for your comment! If you fill out the beta tester form, there are some questions asking about where you live and which banks you’d like to connect with. By answering these questions you can help us figure out which international banks to look at next! Thanks.
http://Www.spinfirm.com Nate

This is actually the precise reason why I am a relatively new Freshbooks user. Quick books provided this service for PC, but when I switched to Mac, they no longer could. I hate manually entering my transactions, and since my bank only stores three months of .csv data, twice I have gone over and been forced to manually fill the gaps from paper statements. If this does what I think it will, I’ll have all sorts of new referrals for you from dissatisfied Quickbooks users.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@Nate: Thanks for commenting! How this works is that FreshBooks will connect to your bank or credit card and for the initial import go back as far as 30-90 days (whatever your bank provides). It will then import automatically on a daily basis after that. Unfortunately on that initial import we can’t go back any further than your bank allows so you may need to do a one time fill-in-the-gaps. But once you have your bank connected in FreshBooks you’ll never have to do this again since imports become automatic. I hope this helps!
Matt

Can we get get this in our account please?

Thanks
Tim

When’s this feature going to be publicly available?
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#melina Melina Stathopoulos

@Tim: We’re working on it! The beta period is all about making sure that we deliver the best experience possible and resolve as many bugs/issues as possible before delivering the feature to everyone. This is the stage we’re in right now, but stay tuned because getting this into your hands is a top priority

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