QuickBooks Online's automatic matching feature applies specifically to QuickBooks Payments, Payroll, and Bill Pay transactions. It links those deposits to your existing QuickBooks records automatically. If it stopped working, the toggle may be off, or your bank may have stopped sending the unique identifiers QuickBooks needs to make the connection.
To check whether automatic matching is on:
- Go to All apps, then Accounting, then Bank transactions.
- Select the Categorized tab.
- Select the Settings (gear icon) at the top of the transaction list.
- Look for Automatic matching and make sure it is turned on.
Note: Automatic matching may not be visible in all accounts yet, depending on which version of the bank transactions interface your account is on. If the gear icon only shows display options (like number of transactions per page), try the steps below.
If the automatic matching option is not visible in the Settings gear:
- Open QuickBooks in an incognito or private window (Ctrl+Shift+N in Chrome). Cached browser data can cause the settings panel to display incorrectly.
- If it appears in the incognito window, clear your browser cache and cookies in your regular browser, then try again.
- If the toggle still is not visible, it may not be available for your account yet. Contact support to confirm.
What automatic matching covers (and what it does not)
Automatic matching handles QuickBooks Payments, Payroll, and Bill Pay deposits, matching them to transactions already recorded in QuickBooks without any manual work. It does not automatically match all downloaded bank transactions from your bank feed; those need to be matched manually using Find match in the For review tab, or auto-categorized using bank rules.
If transactions that used to match automatically are now requiring manual matching and nothing in the Settings has changed, your bank may have stopped sending a unique transaction ID that QuickBooks uses to link records. In that case, the most efficient path is to set up a bank rule for recurring transactions so categorization stays fast.
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