How to check whether your bank feed is still connected

Every month-end close leans on the bank feed arriving on time. When it quietly stops, the damage shows up later as a reconciliation that will not tie. Here is how we check the connection before that happens.

Where a broken feed shows itself

Start at the page that lists your bank transactions. Each connected account sits in its own tile, and the tile is the health monitor. A working connection shows a recent "last updated" timestamp. A broken one shows a warning, an error banner, or a timestamp that has not moved since your last close.

The other symptom is the ledger itself. If the feed stopped mid-month, the register simply ends early. That looks identical to a quiet fortnight, which is why the timestamp matters more than the transaction count.

Confirm before you troubleshoot

Trigger a manual update on the account. This forces a sync and either pulls the missing transactions through or surfaces the real error. Do this before anything else; a stale feed is often just a missed scheduled sync, not a fault.

If the manual update fails, log in to the bank's own website. Banks run maintenance, retire old login flows, and push consent or security prompts that block third-party access until you acknowledge them. A blocked prompt on the bank side is one of the most common causes, and no amount of re-syncing inside the books will clear it.

What it does to your close

A stalled feed does not corrupt anything, but it does starve the reconciliation. Work the bank reconciliation only after the feed is current, otherwise you will reconcile against an incomplete statement and chase differences that are not really there.

Keep evidence as you go. Note the date the feed stopped, the date you noticed, and what the manual update returned. If transactions do arrive late, they may post into the wrong period, so review the cut-off: a payment cleared at the bank before month-end but imported after belongs in the closed month, not the new one.

Ordinary glitch or something worse?

A connection error is a feed problem, not a data problem. The ledger behind it is intact. If instead you see transactions that arrived duplicated, mangled, or mismatched to the wrong account after a reconnect, that points at the data itself rather than the pipe. At that point, stop and take a backup or snapshot before anyone edits anything, and get a QuickBooks data specialist involved. Re-keying over a damaged import makes the repair harder.

The habit that prevents it

Glance at every account tile at the start of each close, not just when something looks wrong. Thirty seconds per account confirms the feed ran through the period end. That check, plus a manual update when in doubt, keeps the reconciliation honest and the close on schedule.