Bank Feed

A bank feed is the automated pipe that brings a bank account's transaction data into accounting or reconciliation software on its own, without a person logging into the bank's site and downloading anything. It's the quiet assumption behind most reconciliation guidance: connect the account once, and every transaction shows up going forward, ready to match against the ledger.

That assumption doesn't hold everywhere. Plenty of regional banks, credit unions, and card platforms don't offer a feed at all, or offer one that's unreliable enough that nobody trusts it. When there's no feed, the only way to get the statement is the way a person has always gotten it: logging into the bank's own portal, often behind two-factor authentication, and pulling the data down by hand, one account at a time, every period.

This is why "no bank feed" isn't a minor inconvenience in a reconciliation cycle, it's usually the single biggest driver of how long the evidence-retrieval step takes for a given account. Retrieval hides inside every reconciliation instead of showing up as its own line item, which is exactly why it's easy to underestimate: the accounts with a live feed take minutes, and the ones without one quietly eat the rest of the close.

A feed only changes how the statement arrives, not what still has to happen to it. Whether the data came in automatically or got pulled from a portal by hand, it still has to go through the same bank reconciliation: every transaction matched, every timing difference and real difference and error identified and worked down to zero. A feed removes a retrieval step. It doesn't remove the reconciliation itself.

Related terms: Bank Reconciliation

Go deeper: Account Reconciliation: The Controller's Guide

Where a bank feed exists, it gets used. Where it doesn't, Adopt's agents operate the bank's own portal the way a person would, logging in and reading the statement directly, so an account without a feed doesn't become the one that quietly holds up the whole close. Sign up free.