Bank Feed Betrayal

🎙️ Episode: Bank Feeds Betrayal 

Welcome to No Se Habla Taxes—the podcast where a CPA does her own bookkeeping and sometimes gets betrayed by QuickBooks itself. 

I’m Melissa Armstrong, fractional controller, solo practice owner, and financial translator for founders who’d rather wrestle with client work than with their bank feeds. 

And today’s confession? 

 I trusted QuickBooks’ little green “Add” button a little too much… and for three whole months, it lied to me. 

✨ Adobe as meals & entertainment. 

 ✨ Zoom living under telephone expense. 

 ✨ Contractor payments sitting in Ask My Accountant. 

On the surface? My books looked tidy. 

 In reality? They were misleading, messy, and costing me clarity. 

In this episode, I’ll share: 

• 🚨 Why blindly trusting bank feeds is dangerous for your business 
• 🧐 How miscategorized expenses distort your P&L (and your decisions) 
• 💡 Five practical fixes: rules, memos, reconciliations, and more 
• 🛑 Why “QuickBooks told me to” isn’t a valid IRS defense 

Plus—you’ll meet Marta Spirk, a speaking coach and TEDx speaker helping women entrepreneurs turn their business into a stage for authentic visibility. 

If you’ve ever hit “Add” in QuickBooks just to get it over with, this episode is for you. Clean books mean clean decisions—and messy books cost you more than time. 

🎧 Listen in for today’s confession, a few hard-earned lessons, and tips to stop your bank feed from betraying you. 

📥 Want my free Bank Feed Cleanup Cheat Sheet? Grab it here 

👉 Don’t forget to subscribe to No Se Habla Taxes wherever you listen, and stay scrappy, stay smart, and double check those Adobe charges. 

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Www.youtube.com/martaspirk
Www.linkedin.com/in/marta-spirk 

Let's connect!

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/armstrongmelissacpa/

Website: https://steadyhandaccounting.com/

Coaching Program Waitlist: https://steadyhandaccounting.myflodesk.com/ofgzp2o7tc

Transcript

0:10

Welcome to No Se Habla Taxes, the podcast where A CPA does her own bookkeeping and somehow manages to get betrayed by QuickBooks, little add button. I'm Melissa Armstrong fractional controller, solo practice owner and financial translator for founders who'd rather wrestle with client work than wrestle with their bank fees. And today as usual. I have a confession. So you know those magical little green buttons in QuickBooks, the ones that suggest a category for every bank transaction? Every expense. Yeah. I trusted their ai. Somewhat blindly. I thought, oh, look, QuickBooks knows me. It knows what I buy. It's practically my bookkeeping BF F, until one day. I realized that for three months, let me say that again. Three months. QuickBooks had been categorizing my Adobe subscription as meals and entertainment. Now I love Acrobat, but I've yet to eat a PDF. I dunno about you, and this was just a start. Dropbox got coded to office supplies. Zoom was heavily living under telephone expense, which I guess isn't technically wrong, but it just wasn't where I needed it for reporting and the contractor payment somehow ended up ask. My accountant, can you believe that I am an accountant? If I code things to ask my accountant, what does that say about me and who am I gonna ask? And I also noticed that my Amazon orders, QuickBooks decided that those were miscellaneous expenses, which is basically code for, I have no idea what this is. Please don't audit me. It looked very tidy, it looked very organized, and that's the dangerous part because it was all wrong. So why does this matter? Well, when you trust the bank feed to be smarter than it really is, your books might look fine, but they're lying to you and lies cost you money. If software expenses are buried under meals, you might think you're overspending on coffee and underspending on tech, so you make the wrong buying decisions. If a contract payment is miscategorized, your PnL doesn't reflect your actual cost of delivery. It may also overstate your accounts payable, and it might mean that your pricing your services blind. If Amazon charges are all miscellaneous, you're not just losing clarity. You might be missing some potential tax deductions. But let me be clear also, if the IRS ever comes knocking, well, QuickBooks told me to. It's not really a defense strategy. So what to do? Well, before I share today's learning moment, I wanna introduce you to someone from my network. Meet Marta Spirk. Marta is a professional singer, TEDx speaker and speaking coach who helps women entrepreneurs increase visibility, confidence, and income by turning their business into a stage for authentic self-expression and impact. She is also the author of the Best Seller, the Empowered Woman, the Ultimate Roadmap to Business Success. And host of the Empowered Women Podcast. To connect with Marta, you can check out her socials www.martaspirk.com. That is M-A-R-T-A-S-P-I-R-K.com. Marta is offering a free consultation for women who want to share their story and build more visibility. Reach out to her at www.martaspirk.com/workwithme and mention my podcast. Now back to bank feeds. The truth is the bank feed is a tool. It's a starting point and not the final answer. Think of it like auto correct. Sometimes it nails it and sometimes it turns meeting into meat loaf gross. So what do you do instead? Always, always review. Don't just click add and move on. Every single transaction deserves at least a glance before you approve it. Tip number two, create some rules on purpose. Don't let QBO guess for you, you can create your own bank rules. So Zoom always goes to software. Canva always goes to subscriptions, and Dropbox always goes to cloud storage. Tip number three, use memos Future. You will thank past you for typing client lunch with Sam or website hosting fee instead of living it blank, especially when you are staring at a charge eight months later, asking yourself if GoDaddy was for your business side or that side hustle that you abandoned in 2021. Tip four. Reconcile regularly. Reconciliation isn't just a CPA buzzword. It is your safety net, and if you're doing it monthly, you'll catch errors before they multiply. Final tip, pay attention to Amazon and PayPal. These are the wild West of expenses. Amazon could be office supplies or it could be cat toys. PayPal could be software or that Etsy candle you swore was for the office. Always, drill down into the receipt. So here's the thing. We hit add without thinking because we just want it done. We want to get through the books, close the laptop, and move on. But bookkeeping is like baking. If you swap sugar for salt, the cake still comes out of the oven. It just, it tastes terrible. And when your books are messy, even if they look neat, you are not just rising taxes, you're risking clarity. Clarity about whether you can afford to hire clarity about whether your margins are healthy. Clarity about whether you can actually take home what you want to pay yourself. Clean books, equal clean decisions and messy books. They cost you way more than the few minutes it takes to slow down and review. So that's my confession, guys. I trusted QuickBooks Bank feed too much and it betrayed me. But here's your takeaway. Don't outsource your judgment to software. We all know AI hallucinates, even the CEO of chat, GPT told us. So use the tools, review the results, and keep your receipts literally and figuratively. If this episode hit a little too close to home, subscribe to No Se Habla taxes. And if you want a simple cheat sheet for cleaning up your bank feed categories, I've got one for you. Until next time, stay scrappy, stay smart, and double check those Adobe charges.