Need a hand?

Note: Automatic Expense Importing is currently only available to North American users.

FreshBooks now provides the ability for you to attach your credit card, bank account, and PayPal account for automatic expense importing on a daily basis. To see if your bank is supported and to start bringing in expenses automatically, follow the steps below. Goodbye manual entry work!

• Connect a Bank Account
• FAQs

Connect a Bank Account

To add a bank account to your FreshBooks account, just follow these steps:

1. Click on the Expenses tab
2. Then click on the connect your bank link

3. A popup will appear asking you to search for your bank

4. Select your bank, then enter the username and password you use to login to your financial institution for online banking. You can verify the link to ensure you have chosen the right bank that you normally log into

5. Check off the box to agree to the Terms of Service
6. William (the squirrel) should be dancing while FreshBooks connects with your bank account

7. Check off the boxes next to the accounts from the bank that you want to connect to your FreshBooks account

8. William (the squirrel) will start dancing again and will import your expenses for the last 30-90 days (depending on your financial institution)
9. Once import is done, you will see a message on the number of expenses that were imported. Click the green Go to my expenses button to see the expenses

10. On your list of your expenses, you will may see up to two notifications. The green one has a link for the latest imported expenses. The blue one indicates any potential duplicate expenses or expenses imported in without a category, with corresponding links to each.

Tip: We recommend checking in on your Bank Accounts sub-tab on a regular basis to ensure your expenses are consistently importing with no errors or actions required by you.

FAQs

When first connecting to a bank account, we will retrieve the last 30-90 days’ worth of expenses. The amount of time we can go back is largely dependent on how far back the financial institution will allow access.

If you have expenses that you want to import outside of the 30-90 days’ window, most banks allow you to export a .csv file of your transactions from your online portal with them. Once these are exported, they can be imported to FreshBooks using our import tool with the steps here.

Note: FreshBooks is single-entry, so only expenses in the form of payment and debit transactions will be imported in. Deposits and credits will not be imported in.

NOTE: Severing a bank will not remove expenses that have already been imported for the account. If you want to remove all expenses, Go to the Expenses tab, then click on Bank Accounts, and then click on the View expenses link. You will be able to delete the expenses directly from this account now.

To disconnect:

1. Click on the Expenses tab and then on the Bank Accounts sub-tab just below
2. Here you will see each account that you have connected in its own box detailing account name and last updated
3. Click on disconnect for the specific account that you need to remove. That’s it!

FreshBooks has partnered with a third party service provider to provide the Automatic Expense Import feature. User IDs, passwords, PINs and responses to security verification questions are never logged by FreshBooks, and are kept private and protected by our partner.

For more information on security and safeguard policies, you can review FreshBooks’ here and the Terms of Service for the third party provider here.