How Open Banking bank feeds work
This article explains how Open Banking bank feeds work once you’ve enabled a bank feed in your FreeAgent account.
Once a bank feed has been enabled via Open Banking, this establishes a secure connection between the bank and the FreeAgent account to automatically import bank transactions into FreeAgent each day.
Please note:
- Open Banking bank feeds can be backdated for up to two years. If you need transactions from more than two years ago, you can upload these from a bank statement before enabling the feed.
- Once a bank feed has been enabled and the initial import has been completed, you won’t be able to backdate the feed to import any historical transactions prior to the first import. To account for historical transactions, you can either upload them from a bank statement or enter them manually.
- A bank feed will not directly import the balance of an account into FreeAgent. While some bank feed connections do have the Balance at bank feature, the balance displayed within FreeAgent is an internal calculation based off of the transactional data that has been added to the account. Read more about understanding your bank balance in FreeAgent.
- There is not an option to manually trigger a new import on Open Banking feeds. These are set to run automatically once every 24 hours.
- You'll need to make sure that all of the bank accounts that you wish to set up bank feed connections for are added to the Banking area in FreeAgent first.
- If you decide to grant FreeAgent access to multiple accounts at your bank, you'll need to click into each individual bank account from within FreeAgent to enable each feed. The bank feeds won’t all automatically enable for each bank account within FreeAgent.
Enabling an Open Banking bank feed
Navigate to the relevant bank account and select ‘Enable bank feed’ in the top-right or in the ‘Bank feed’ panel.
Read more about how to enable an Open Banking bank feed.
Choosing the start date of your transaction imports
After you’ve chosen the bank account(s) you want to grant FreeAgent access to, you’ll be asked to choose a date that you want the bank feed to start importing transactions from.
By default, FreeAgent will look to use the FreeAgent Start Date that was selected when setting up the FreeAgent account. However, if transactions have been uploaded into the bank account from bank statements before the feed is enabled, FreeAgent will check the date of the last transaction that’s been uploaded and look to start the bank feed from the day after. For example, if you uploaded bank transactions up until the 5th June and then enable a bank feed, the feed will look to start importing from the 6th June to prevent any transactions being imported that already exist within FreeAgent.
If bank transactions have been manually added to the bank account before the feed is enabled, these will overlooked by the bank feed and it will look to start importing transactions from your FreeAgent start date. For example, if you have a FreeAgent Start Date of the 6th April and manually entered transactions up until the 1st July and then enable a feed, it would look to start importing transactions from the FreeAgent Start Date of the 6th April. Therefore, if you've manually entered transactions before enabling the feed, you may wish to select 'Choose another date' and pick the date after the last manually added transaction to prevent these being imported by the feed (2nd July in the example above).
How Open Banking bank feeds work
Once a bank feed has been enabled via Open Banking, the feeds will automatically run an import once every 24 hours.
We schedule the import to be run in this way to ensure that we’re pulling through a full day's worth of transactions rather than partial bits of a day. This helps ensure that all transactions are included.
In addition to this, the feeds are only able to import transactional data that has been made available by the bank directly. This means that if the bank does not share transaction details at a time of an import, nothing will be brought across to FreeAgent. In other words, the bank feed will only be able to pull through transactions which are deemed as fully cleared by the bank and available to the feed at the time of the import.
Even though a transaction may no longer look to be pending in the online banking account, it's not until the point it is fully cleared behind the scenes that it’s available for the bank feed to import to FreeAgent.
Transaction delays from weekends and bank holidays
You may notice a short delay in transactions that take place over the weekend as the banks are normally closed over this period. When they reopen on Monday, they'll have a backlog of transactions to clear from the weekend, so these should be imported into FreeAgent the following day (Tuesday) when the next scheduled import is run.
Transactions will also be slightly delayed when there’s a bank holiday. This means that when the bank reopens, they’ll have a backlog of transactions (from the weekend and the bank holiday) to clear and make available for the feed to import into FreeAgent. Therefore, if the bank reopens on a Tuesday, the feed most likely will only be able to import transactions on the scheduled import for the Wednesday.