Why do I need to reconnect my bank account in QuickBooks every few days, and how do I stop it?

Needing to reconnect once every 90 days or so is normal. Needing to reconnect every couple of days is not, and it usually points to one specific, fixable cause rather than something wrong with your bank.

Why some banks ask you to reconnect more than others

Each bank sets its own security rules for how long a connection to QuickBooks stays valid before it needs to be re-verified. Some banks require reconnecting every 90 business days, while others go as long as 18 months. That's why Citi and Chase might prompt you far more often than Wells Fargo or American Express: it comes down to each bank's own policy, not anything QuickBooks is doing differently between them.

If you're on QuickBooks Self-Employed

1. Go to the Settings ⚙ icon and select Bank accounts.
2. Select Connect another account.
3. Enter the name of your bank and the account type, then follow the onscreen instructions to reconnect.

Important: don't delete the bank connection instead of reconnecting it. Deleting it permanently removes your transaction history.

If reconnecting fixes it for a day or two and then breaks again, two things commonly cause that:

• Shared logins across multiple companies. If more than one QuickBooks company uses the same bank login, your bank only allows one active connection at a time. Every time one company reconnects, it disconnects the others, so it can look like the connection keeps failing when it's actually rotating between companies.
• Partial account access. When your bank asks which accounts to share during reconnection, choose all accounts, even the ones you don't use in QuickBooks. Selecting only some accounts is a common cause of the connection dropping again soon after.

If you're on QuickBooks Desktop for Mac

The steps above are for QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Self-Employed, so they won't match what you see in QuickBooks Desktop for Mac. If you're getting a similar reconnect message there:

1. Close and reopen QuickBooks.
2. Open your company file, then go to Banking, then Online Banking Setup, and try reconnecting.
3. If that doesn't fix it, confirm with your bank that your account is activated for the online banking service QuickBooks uses, since all U.S. and Canadian banks that support this have a dedicated escalation path for it.
4. If it's still not resolved, collect your log files (Help, then Product Information, then the Logging tab) and contact support so they can troubleshoot with those logs.

If backups are also failing

A separate but related issue is a company file that won't back up. This is often caused by data damage in the file rather than the backup process itself:

1. Go to File, then Utilities, then select Verify Data.
2. If QuickBooks finds errors, go back to File, then Utilities, and select Rebuild Data.
3. Once the rebuild finishes, run Verify Data again to confirm the file is clean, then try the backup again.

If you're on an older macOS version, that can also cause backup failures on its own, so it's worth confirming you're on the latest supported macOS and the latest QuickBooks release too.

Let us know if any of these steps don't match what you're seeing, and we'll dig in further.