Noticing a broken bank feed the day it breaks
A feed does not fail loudly. The bank rotates an MFA prompt, the connection sits waiting for an answer nobody sees, and from the ledger side the month simply looks quiet until a reconciliation difference appears weeks later. Watching for the last successful refresh per ledger and raising the silence while the gap is small is most of the work. The rest is knowing that the fix usually ends in a reauthorisation, which means a fresh backfill, and that a backfill overlapping transactions already imported is where duplicate rows come from. Catch it on day one and the cleanup never happens.
Everything is finished and the return still cannot be filed, because the signature authorisation has not come back.
The trial balance is the centre of this work, and most of the repeated labour is getting source material into a shape the trial balance can accept. Statements arrive as PDFs, receipts arrive as photographs, and bank data arrives through an aggregator that authenticates against a bank which changes its login flow without notice.
- QuickBooks Online
- Xero
- Google Sheets
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if nobody owns the alert. An unrouted alert is the dashboard nobody opens, with extra steps.
The constraint that shapes it
Tax return information is governed by a statute that makes disclosure or use outside preparation a criminal matter, with a parallel civil penalty, and consent has to be obtained in a prescribed form naming the recipient and the purpose. More on how this sector works.
No alarm goes off when a thing simply stops arriving. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Noticing that an agent licence has quietly lapsed
- Watching an MLS feed for the day it goes quiet
- Catching a lapse date nobody put on a calendar
- Closing the registration window before it closes you
- Scheduling the visits a membership already promised
- Closing the permit that never got its final inspection
- Why did my bank feed stop importing with no error message?
- How do I get alerted when a QuickBooks bank feed disconnects?
- What does QuickBooks bank error 324 actually mean?
- How often does a bank connection have to be reauthorised?
- How do I check bank feeds across every client ledger at once?
Back to accounting and bookkeeping, or see how this is priced and scoped.