I’m having problems with my NAB bank feed …

There are a number of reasons why bank feeds don’t reconcile, but if you’ve checked everything else, this may explain the cause. Currently it appears if you have multiple credit card accounts with NAB – an Australian high street bank, one of the accounts is deemed to be the MOTHER or MASTER account, and all other credit card accounts default to the BABY or SUBSIDIARY account.

For some quirky reason if you have a SUBSIDIARY NAB credit card account – the running balance includes any credit card interest charges. OK? The running balance INCLUDES credit card interest charges. HOWEVER, the credit card interest charges are not itemised on the transactional record, they are not included in the transactional record and therefore they don’t feed through in the bank feeds. Logical NOT!

Note : I can’t see any easy way to identify if a Credit Card is a MASTER or SUBSIDIARY card.
Note : The bank interest appears in a separated block on the online or paper statements, but it’s not available anywhere else.

To reconcile to the accurate running balance, it’s necessary to manually add back the credit card interest charges. I suggest doing this as a lump sum monthly.

When I spoke to NAB they said if requested, seven years of historical online statements could be uploaded into your internet banking in a 24 hour period. I suggest if you’re having reconciliation issues – ask NAB to do this – and then check the credit card interest.

I’ve also identified this issue with Bendigo Bank. This is an issue with bank feeds – not with the online accounting solution.

My ANZ Credit Card is not importing all transactions?

I have a client who receives a single credit card statement from ANZ. Transactions had been feeding in fine up until a few months ago (maybe Jume 2014).

Upon investigation I discovered, at the top of the actually ANZ statement the account was listed as e.g. x1111. There were two credit cards issues against the statement, let’s call them x2222 and x3333. I looked at the actual transactions and it seems that:

  • x1111 bank feed was just the interest and the payments against the account
  • x2222 bank feed was only the transactions made by the person who held this card
  • x3333 bank feed was only the transactions made by the person who held this card

Frustrating yes! But this is an issue between the ANZ and Yodlee bank feeds, so if you are experiencing this issue you need to go back and tell ANZ to issue the bank feed as a single bank feed (however the bank tellers are unlikely to understand this – so ask them to forward it to technical support). This won’t fix your issue but if enough people report the issue to ANZ maybe they will change the feed at their end.

In the meantime, I have suggested to the client, setting up the three separate feeds in Xero, and grouping them in the Balance Sheet, so you access the Balance Sheet Report to see the current balance of the credit card.

It’s not ideal, but it is a work around.

When the game of Xero snap stops!

You’ve been using Xero bank feeds for ages, and transactions were auto-magically suggesting reconciliations, so life was a breezy game of snap! Then one day – it all seemed to stop?!?! What happened?

Perhaps someone using the payment facilities has started shopping at a new shop, or the shop changed the description it using on the credit card/merchant facility. This would mean Xero does not recognise what it sees as a ‘new’ transaction and is not auto-magically reconciling it.

To resolve this allocate a correct code to single transactions, reconcile and click OK, Xero should then remember the transaction. Then go to the top of the browser, click the refresh button, and the other similar transactions should have the ‘OK’ reconciliation button, and you can resume your game of Snap!