“Should I use the bank feed or import files”
Most finance software offers both, and the choice is usually made by default rather than deliberately. They fail in different ways, which matters more than which is more convenient on a good day.
Symptoms
The feed keeps breaking and you are unsure whether to persist with it Your bank charges for the connection service You would rather not share banking credentials with an intermediary
What actually causes it
Feeds depend on a third party staying current
An automatic connection relies on a service reading your bank on your behalf. Every site redesign or new verification step can break it, and the fix is not in your hands — which is why feed outages last days rather than minutes.
File import depends only on the bank's export
Downloading a file uses the bank's own function. Nothing sits between you and it, so it keeps working when feeds do not — at the cost of a few clicks each month.
They differ on credentials and cost
Feeds usually require storing credentials with an intermediary and are sometimes charged for. A downloaded file involves neither, which matters if you handle other people's books.
How to fix it
- Use the feed while it works — it is less effort and the data is the same.
- Keep the file route as your fallback rather than a last resort, so an outage costs a download instead of a gap in your records.
- Drop each downloaded file into the fixer below before importing; that is what makes the fallback dependable.
- Keep import ranges non-overlapping when switching between the two, since the transaction identifiers may not match.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The file route is only a real fallback if the files import cleanly — which is precisely what the fixer guarantees before you rely on it. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer