Accounting guide
Bank feeds in South Africa: the question to ask before you buy
A feed that does not cover your account removes most of the reason to pay for cloud accounting. How to test yours before committing.
A bank feed is the single feature that decides whether cloud accounting saves you time or just moves your typing to a browser. Coverage in South Africa is uneven, and you can test it before you pay.
What a feed actually does
A bank feed delivers your transactions into the ledger automatically, usually daily. Reconciliation then becomes a matter of confirming matches the software has proposed rather than capturing lines from a statement.
With rules trained on your recurring transactions, most lines match themselves. The work that remains is the exceptions, which is where a bookkeeper should be spending time anyway.
Why coverage is uneven here
Feeds depend on an arrangement between the software vendor and each bank, and those arrangements are negotiated bank by bank and product by product. A vendor may have a direct feed for a current account at one of the large banks and nothing for a credit card at the same bank.
Business accounts, credit cards, foreign currency accounts and accounts at smaller banks are the usual gaps. None of this is visible on a pricing page, and the marketing list of supported banks rarely distinguishes account types.
How to test it properly in a trial
Do not evaluate feeds inside the demo company that ships with the product. Start a free trial, then connect every account your business actually uses. Every current account, every credit card, every savings account you post to.
Then wait. A feed that connects is not the same as a feed that delivers. Give it two or three days and confirm transactions are arriving daily, complete, with usable descriptions. Thirty day trials exist precisely so you can do this.
What to do when there is no feed
The fallback is importing a statement file, usually OFX, QIF or CSV, downloaded from your online banking. It works and it is not terrible, but it is a manual step somebody has to remember every week.
Price that honestly. If two of your five accounts need manual import, the time saving that justified the subscription is materially smaller, and a cheaper product may make more sense.
Security questions worth asking
Ask how the feed is authorised. A direct arrangement with your bank, where you approve the connection through the bank's own process, is preferable to anything that asks for your online banking credentials.
If a product asks you to hand over your banking username and password so it can log in as you, understand what you are agreeing to and check what your bank's terms say about sharing credentials.
Rules are what make a feed pay for itself
A feed on its own only delivers transactions. What turns that into a saving is bank rules, which tell the software that a payment to a particular supplier is always coded to a particular account, so the line arrives already matched.
Expect to spend two or three reconciliation cycles training those rules before the speed arrives. Businesses that judge a product in the first week usually conclude that reconciliation is no faster, because at that point it genuinely is not.
Common questions
01Which South African banks support bank feeds?
The major banks are generally supported by the main cloud ledgers, but coverage differs by account type and by software vendor. The only reliable test is connecting your own accounts during a free trial.
02Do bank feeds cost extra?
Usually not on the mainstream cloud products, where feeds are included in the subscription. Some products limit the number of connected accounts by plan tier, so check that against how many accounts you actually run.
03What if my bank is not supported?
You import statement files manually, typically OFX or CSV from online banking. It works, but it is a recurring manual task and it reduces the time saving that justified buying cloud accounting.
Editorial note
This guide is general buying guidance and not accounting, legal or tax advice. Amounts and deadlines set by SARS change, so confirm the current figures for your own business before you rely on them.