Your bank feed stops at 90 days. Here's how to catch up from PDF statements

Cedar Point Physiotherapy Inc. signs on in October. Their books stop in March of last year. You connect the chequing account in QuickBooks Online and get three months of transactions. That leaves fifteen months to fill.

It’s a common catch-up job, and the order you do it in decides how much of it you do twice.

Why the feed doesn’t reach back

A bank feed brings in what the bank shares through its connection, and that is usually recent history. Intuit’s own staff put it as “Some financial institutions let you download the last 90 days of transactions. Others can go back as far as 24 months” (QuickBooks Community). For QuickBooks Desktop’s Web Connect files, Intuit says the first download “may be 30, 60, 90 days, or more depending on the bank” (Intuit Canada).

Statements are different. Many banks keep monthly PDF statements in online banking for years, though how far back varies by bank and account. For a catch-up, the statements are the source of truth, and the feed covers only the end.

Step 1: List every account before you touch a transaction

Ask the client for a list of every account and card used for the business in the period: chequing, savings, each credit card, a line of credit, any USD account. Then ask for every monthly PDF statement for each, from the month before the books stop to the month the feed starts.

For Cedar Point that is one chequing account, one savings account and one business Visa: 16 statements each, 48 in total.

Put them in one folder per account, named by period (2024-03, 2024-04, …) so a missing month is visible at a glance.

Step 2: Check the months join

Before reading a single transaction, check continuity. Each statement’s opening balance should equal the previous statement’s closing balance.

Statement	Opening	Closing	Joins the month before
Chequing 2024-03	12,480.16	9,902.44	(first)
Chequing 2024-04	9,902.44	11,315.07	yes
Chequing 2024-05	11,315.07	8,741.90	yes
Chequing 2024-07	10,066.12	12,210.55	no: June is missing

A break means a missing statement, not a missing transaction. Ask for it now, while the client is still answering email, rather than in week three.

Step 3: Check each statement against its own totals

Most statements print an opening and closing balance. Many also print total deposits and withdrawals, the number of each, or a balance on every row. Whatever method you use to get rows out of the PDF, check the rows against those figures before they go near the ledger:

• opening + deposits − withdrawals = closing;
• the number of deposits and withdrawals you have equals the number printed;
• your running balance agrees with the printed balance on each row.

A statement that fails tells you what is wrong (a withdrawal missing, 96.40) and the running balance tells you where. How the running balance finds a missing transaction walks through it.

Fixing a statement at this stage takes minutes because the PDF is open in front of you. Finding the same missing row at the reconcile screen, after 48 statements have been imported, takes much longer.

Step 4: Import only the gap

Decide the cut-off: the day before the feed’s first transaction. Import statement rows up to that date and let the feed cover the rest. Overlapping the two creates duplicates you’ll have to match out by hand.

• QuickBooks Online accepts CSV, QBO, QFX and OFX files through “Upload from file”. Intuit’s help gives a 350 KB limit per CSV file (Intuit help), so import a few months at a time.
• QuickBooks Desktop takes .qbo through Web Connect or .iif straight into the register. See Importing bank transactions into QuickBooks Desktop: IIF or QBO.

Do not deduplicate the statement rows before import. Two identical transactions on the same day, such as two 45.00 parking charges, are often real. The printed counts are what tell you whether you have one row too many.

Step 5: Reconcile month by month, oldest first

In the ledger, reconcile each account one statement at a time, starting with the oldest. Because every statement already agreed with its own totals in step 3, a difference at this stage points to something in the books (an opening balance entered wrong, a transaction coded to the wrong account) rather than a row lost in conversion.

Keep each month’s check alongside its reconciliation report. When the client’s accountant asks how the catch-up was done, you can show them.

A checklist to keep

1. Every account and card listed with the client.
2. Every monthly statement collected, one folder per account.
3. Openings join closings; missing months requested.
4. Each statement checked against its opening, closing, counts and running balance.
5. Cut-off set to the day before the feed starts.
6. Imported, a few months at a time.
7. Reconciled oldest first; each month’s check kept.

Where DocsToBooks fits

Steps 2 and 3 are what DocsToBooks does: drop in the 48 PDFs, and each statement is checked against its printed totals, with the months checked for gaps. You export the ones that reconcile as QBO, IIF, CSV or Excel. Catch-up and year-end with DocsToBooks.