Tips for using Cloud Feeds

Cloud Feeds is a powerful feature that allows you to connect your bank and credit card accounts to BQE CORE and download the transactions for accounting purposes. To get the most out of Cloud Feeds in CORE, check out these useful tips.

Getting Started with Cloud Feeds

Configuring your Cloud Feeds

Using Cloud Feeds

Getting Started with Cloud Feeds

  • Add your bank or credit card accounts to your Chart of Accounts in CORE before you set up the cloud feeds.
  • Add items and profiles, such as vendors and classes, in CORE before you set up and match transactions in Cloud Feeds.
  • When adding your accounts to CORE, you can select the account from the list or use the search function to find your financial institution quickly. You can add multiple accounts in CORE.
  • While connecting accounts, verify your credentials to ensure your transactions and feeds download securely into CORE.
  • You can choose to exclude accounts when setting up Cloud Feeds in CORE. This is helpful in cases such as personal accounts you don’t want to include in the feeds.
  • Excluded accounts do not show up in Cloud Feeds in future. However, you can reconnect to such accounts by first disconnecting and then signing in again to Cloud Feeds.

Configuring your Cloud Feeds

  • Learn the basics of using the Cloud Feeds feature by reading this help article or watching this video.
  • Manage the rules for your Cloud Feeds. Rules let you set up categories and conditions for transactions as they transfer into CORE and the accounts they get attributed to.
  • Edit your Cloud Feeds to change settings, such as the account nickname or accounts linked to CORE.
  • Link an employee or employee group to a specific Cloud Feeds account. This allows your employees to match and reconcile business expenses specific to them, say company credit card, regardless of their CORE subscription. Accessing their credit card feeds for expense reporting is a very useful option.
  • Sort your Cloud Feeds by account name, balance, institution, etc. You can also choose to display or hide columns and control the column size. CORE remembers your settings for the next time you visit this screen.
  • Most bank and credit card institutions allow you to import bank feeds or transactions up to the last 3 months (90 days), although in some cases it can be up to 6 months. It depends on the financial institution or bank being connected to.

Using Cloud Feeds

  • CORE allows you to quickly and easily refresh your bank feeds with the click of a button, ensuring you have the most up to date information when you need it. You can also update the credentials for a feed, in case you’ve made changes to your financial institution login. 
  • Use a separate tab or window to view your bank or credit card register and Cloud Feeds at the same time. This helps in comparing the transactions and ensuring none are left out.
  • CORE displays all the matched transactions between your account and CORE account. If there are no possible matches, you can manually find the matching transactions using Find Match, provided they exist in CORE. 
  • CORE allows you to match and fix any discrepancies there might be there by creating a new transaction for the difference.
  • If you are looking for a specific transaction while mapping, you can search your transactions using the Filter Transactions search box.
  • You can enter new transactions by posting them to the accounts or entering them as time or expense line items against projects. The latter is relevant for credit cards and checks because then CORE is able to integrate these cloud feeds with its existing A/P and A/R system.
  • Have CORE open in two tabs, so you can add what you need while you’re matching transactions. Say you encounter a new payee, you can add the vendor in one tab without losing your place in the other Cloud Feeds tab. CORE is smart. As you add the payees in one tab, they will show up in the other. There’s no need to refresh CORE.
  • Check the 'Remember as rule' option if you want CORE to remember these settings for similar transactions in the future. CORE’s business intelligence allows you to define these rules for imported cloud feeds so that they can be posted automatically to the predefined accounts, making the process even faster. 
  • CORE allows you to ‘Ignore’ transactions after connecting your bank accounts to CORE accounts. These transactions no longer show up in CORE, even after refreshing the feeds. CORE Cloud Feeds has an in-built mechanism to detect duplicate feeds from third-party feeds sources and automatically mark them as ignored.
  • While adding imported transactions, CORE lets you split transactions into multiple line items. You can split the transaction amount equally or by a custom amount or percentage. You can even choose to remember a split transaction as a rule.
  • For bank transactions that are similar, you can perform batch actions in CORE, such as Batch Add or Batch Transfer to save time and effort.