Bank Feeds That Arrive Already Coded
Open banking in IQ Books: how a connected account becomes reviewed bookkeeping, how far back it reaches, what it holds back, and what it costs.
Quick answer
A bank feed in IQ Books is an open banking consent you give at your own bank through BankSync, the provider the feed runs on. Once connected, new transactions arrive in the books on their own, already coded by CodeIQ’s eight-phase pipeline, with transfers paired across accounts and anything uncertain held back with a stated reason. Nothing posts by itself unless you switch auto-post on. A new connection brings roughly the last two to three months, because that is what UK banks release, so upload a statement for anything older and an overlap guard stops the two paths duplicating each other. The feed costs nothing from us: you take a small monthly plan with BankSync directly, and coding is the usual 4 credits a line with a monthly cap you set.
What a bank feed actually is
A bank feed is a standing permission. You sign in at your own bank, tick the accounts you are willing to share, and the bank itself starts handing over the transaction list to the software you named. Nothing is scraped, no password is stored anywhere, and you can revoke it from your online banking without asking anyone.
That permission is an open banking consent, and two properties of it matter more than anything else in this article.
The two rules that shape everything
The consent belongs to the bank, not the account. When you consent at Lloyds to share a current account and a credit card, that is one consent covering two accounts. You cannot give up half of it. Any software that pretends otherwise is lying to you about what it can revoke.
The consent expires. UK banks issue them for about six months, then ask you to say yes again. That is the regulation working as intended, not a fault.
The feed in IQ Books runs on BankSync, an open banking provider. You take a small plan with BankSync directly, which covers your bank connections, and IQ Books charges nothing for the feed itself. We would rather tell you that plainly than bury a third party in the small print.
Connecting an account
Pick the source
A bank, or a payment channel. Banks and PayPal go through open banking. Stripe uses a restricted key you generate yourself. eBay connects with a seller consent at eBay.
Consent at the bank
You are handed to your own bank’s login, in your bank’s own screens. Choose which accounts to share. We never see a credential.
Map each account to a ledger account
A shared account becomes a bank account in the books. If one already exists, point the feed at it rather than creating a second.
Choose a start date, then finish
The pull-from date is the floor. Set it to the day after your last reconciled statement and the feed will not reach back behind work you have already done. Pressing Done runs the first pull and tells you what it found.
What happens to a line between the bank and the ledger
A transaction does not go straight into your books. It lands in a staging layer first, and that layer is the reason a feed can be re-run without consequence.
| Stage | What happens | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|---|
| Ingest | The line is stored against the bank’s own identifier for it | The same line arriving twice is recognised and ignored, so a repeated sync never duplicates anything |
| Resolve | Transfers, duplicates of rows you already uploaded by CSV, and anything that looks unfinished are separated out | The awkward cases are dealt with before they reach the ledger, not after |
| Project | What survives becomes a draft bank transaction carrying its origin | Every row can tell you it came from the feed, and which feed line it was |
| Code | CodeIQ’s eight-phase pipeline suggests the account, the contact and the VAT treatment | You open a coded queue, not a blank one |
The overlap guard in that second stage is worth dwelling on. Most people connect a feed part way through a period they have already been uploading statements for. Without a guard you get every line twice: once from the CSV, once from the feed. The guard matches a feed line to an existing row on date, amount and a normalised description, and it is deliberately strict. It will not merge a daily recurring charge across days, and it will not reuse a row that another feed line has already claimed.
How far back a new connection reaches
Expect two to three months, not two years
UK banks decide how much history a fresh consent carries, and in practice it is around 60 to 90 days. Asking for more does not produce more. This is a bank decision, not a software limit, and every open banking product you look at has the same ceiling.
So a feed is not a migration tool. The honest onboarding is both: connect the feed for everything from today, and upload statements for the history behind it. The overlap guard is what makes doing both safe.
The health check nobody else shows you
A feed can fail quietly. The connection looks fine, the last sync says success, and yet three days of transactions never arrived. The only reliable way to catch that is to compare what you hold against what the bank says the balance is.
Every fed account carries that comparison on its card. When the ledger balance and the bank’s balance agree, the chip is quiet. When they do not, it says by how much. A difference is not always a fault: an account whose feed starts mid-life will differ by exactly the opening balance you have not yet entered, and a clearing account for a payment processor almost always does. But a difference that appears out of nowhere on a settled account is the first sign of a gap, and you find out on the day rather than at the quarter end.
One connection can carry several banks
This trips people up, so it is worth being explicit. A single open banking connection can hold more than one bank. Adding a second bank to an existing connection is a normal thing to do, and it means the connection is not "your Lloyds feed", it is a container.
Which matters because of the disconnect button. If a panel is titled after the first bank on it and the disconnect button in that panel actually revokes everything, someone will one day disconnect what the screen called Lloyds and silently kill their PayPal feed too. So the panel names every bank on the connection, the disconnect dialog lists each account with its masked number, and the button says how many it is about to take.
Disconnecting one bank, not all of them
You can drop a single bank from a shared connection and leave the rest running. What you cannot do is drop one account and keep another from the same bank, because they share one consent. The two things that do work are switching a single account off in the account list, which keeps the consent and is reversible, or reconnecting at the bank and sharing fewer accounts, which gives that account up for good.
If the bank stops sharing an account, the feed notices at the next discovery and the account stops presenting itself as connected. What is already in the books stays there.
What it costs
Paid to BankSync
- A small monthly plan, taken directly by you
- Covers the bank connections themselves
- How often the feed syncs follows the plan you choose
Paid in IQ Suite credits
- 4 credits a line when CodeIQ codes it, the same as any other transaction
- A monthly credit cap on each feed connection, which you set
- Nothing extra for the feed, the holds or the health check
The cap deserves a word. An unattended process that spends credits is a process that can surprise you, so each connection has a ceiling per month, which you set. Reach it and coding stops rather than quietly billing on. The lines keep arriving, they just arrive uncoded, and they are waiting for you when the month turns over or you raise the ceiling.
What still needs a person
A feed that posted everything it received would be a liability. The things it deliberately does not decide on its own are covered in the companion piece on what should post by itself, but the short version is this: transfers between your own accounts, invoice and bill matches, anything split across accounts, reverse-charge and postponed VAT, and anything the pipeline is not confident about, all wait for you. Everything that waits says why it is waiting.
Connect an account and see a coded month
IQ Books is free for one organisation with the full bank-first set. Connect a bank, set the pull-from date to the day after your last reconciled statement, and look at what comes back.
Open IQ BooksFrequently asked questions
Do you store my online banking password?
No, and we never see it. You sign in at your own bank, in your bank’s own screens, and the bank issues a consent to share the accounts you ticked. You can revoke that consent from your online banking at any time without telling us.
How often does the feed pull?
It depends on the BankSync plan you take. The entry plan syncs less often than the higher ones, so the honest answer is that the cadence follows your plan. A daily poll and an hourly resolver run on our side, so whatever BankSync has is picked up promptly, and pushed deliveries arrive within seconds when your plan sends them.
Why does my new feed only go back two months?
Because that is what the bank released. UK banks decide how much history a fresh open banking consent carries, and 60 to 90 days is typical. Asking for two years does not produce two years. Upload a statement for the earlier period instead, and the overlap guard will keep the two from duplicating.
Will connecting a feed duplicate the statements I already uploaded?
No. Every feed line is checked against the rows already in the books on date, amount and a normalised description before it is allowed to project. The guard will not merge a daily recurring charge across days, and it will not claim a row another feed line has already taken.
Can I connect PayPal, Stripe or eBay?
Yes. PayPal connects through the same open banking wizard as a bank. Stripe connects with a restricted read-only key you generate in your own Stripe dashboard. eBay connects with a seller consent at eBay, and its payouts post as settlement journals.
What happens when the consent expires?
The account shows that it needs reconnecting, and you go through the bank’s consent screen again. Nothing already in the books is affected, and the feed picks up from where it stopped.
Does the feed post to my books automatically?
Only if you switch auto-post on, and even then only within a narrow envelope at 90% or 95% confidence. Transfers, invoice matches, splits, reverse-charge VAT and future-dated lines never post themselves. By default every fed line waits in the drafts for you.