How a Distribution Company Found Six Weeks of Transactions a Broken Bank Feed Never Imported
Sam's List Editorial | 2026-09-28
This is an illustrative anonymized composite drawn from patterns that recur in small business bookkeeping. It is not a specific client engagement, and no outcome described here is guaranteed or predictive of anyone else's result.
The first sign was a vendor on the phone, calling to say it had been paid twice for the same invoice.
Nobody suspected the accounting system. A bank feed not importing transactions does not announce itself. It does not throw an error, flag a row red, or send anybody an email. It just stops, and the screen underneath it keeps looking exactly the way it looked when the feed was working.
Six weeks had passed. The books during that window were not wrong in the sense of containing bad entries. They were incomplete, which is harder to see and harder to unwind.
Why a Bank Feed Not Importing Transactions Produces Silence Instead of an Error
A working feed produces rows. A dead one produces fewer rows.
That is the entire failure. The connection had dropped after the bank pushed a change to its login flow, which is routine and happens constantly. The accounting software kept the connection listed as active. It simply stopped pulling anything new, and a slower week looked like a slower week.
The bookkeeper was categorizing whatever appeared. There is no screen that says "eleven transactions did not arrive today," because the software does not know what it did not receive. Absence is the one thing an automated feed is structurally unable to report on.
So the team kept doing accurate work on an incomplete population. Every entry that existed was coded correctly. That is what made the whole thing survivable for six weeks.
A Bank Feed Not Importing Transactions Can Survive a Clean Reconciliation
This is the part people find hardest to believe, and it is the most important mechanic in the story.
A reconciliation compares what is in the books against a statement ending balance. Say the books are missing a customer deposit and, over the same period, missing vendor payments of roughly the same total. The difference nets toward zero and the ending balance still ties. That is arithmetic, not evidence. A tied reconciliation says the net effect of what you recorded matches the bank's net change. It says nothing about whether every item is present.
The team also cleared the reconciliation with a small unexplained adjustment more than once, because the amount looked immaterial and the month needed to close. Each one was defensible alone. Together they were the alarm, muffled.
The check that would have caught it is dull: count the transactions on the bank statement, count the transactions in the register for the same period, and see whether the two agree. Nobody was doing it.
What the Gap Did to Decisions Already Made
Cash looked better than it was, because payments were missing more than receipts were.
The owner had read a cash position that was overstated and made a real decision off it: authorizing a warehouse hire and a related equipment purchase in the same week. Neither was reckless. Both were sized against a number that was wrong in one direction.
The duplicate vendor payment was the visible loss, and it was recovered. The quarter's reporting was the bigger problem, because it had already gone to a lender before anyone knew the feed had stopped. That reporting was wrong, and correcting it after the fact is a conversation, not a keystroke.
That is the honest cost. Not a catastrophe, and not nothing.
The Repair Had to Happen in a Specific Order
The instinct was to reconnect the feed and let it backfill. That was the wrong first move.
Reconnecting first invites the feed to import a partial or overlapping range on top of manually entered activity, which produces duplicates that are far more tedious to find than the original gap. The sequence that worked was slower and dumber.
First, define the gap precisely by pulling the bank's own statements for the affected weeks and identifying the last transaction that actually imported. Second, enter the missing activity from the statements rather than from memory or from the vendor bills. Third, reconcile each affected month again, this time checking counts as well as balances. Only then reconnect the feed, with the start date set deliberately, and check the first week of new imports against the bank by hand.
Then the duplicate payment, which by that point was obvious rather than mysterious.
What Changed Afterward, and What Did Not
The new control took about two minutes a month: compare the number of transactions on the bank statement to the number in the register for the same period, and investigate any difference before closing.
That is the whole thing. It does not require software, a policy document, or a new hire. It works because it tests for the one failure a reconciliation cannot detect, which is a missing item offset by another missing item.
What the count check does not do is worth saying in the same breath. It compares quantities, so it stays quiet when a transaction imported with the wrong amount, when a missing item happens to be offset by a duplicated one, or on an account where somebody keys activity in by hand anyway. It is a cheap test for one specific failure, not a substitute for looking at the register.
The company also moved the monthly work to an outside provider. That is the shape of engagement System Six is built for: a Seattle firm, 41 people, running day-to-day finance since 2009 for businesses in the $1 million to $10 million revenue band, nationwide. Bookkeeping, payroll processing, bill pay and invoicing are the services named; modernizing a finance function is the stated focus, and a recurring two-minute count is about as unglamorous as modernization gets.
The limitation, stated plainly: handing the work outside does not guarantee this gets caught. An outside provider working from the same silent feed, without a count check in its own process, can miss exactly what an internal bookkeeper missed. The control is what catches it, not the org chart. System Six also lists a $1 million revenue minimum and a monthly fixed fee starting at $800 per month, so smaller businesses are outside its stated scope. Before you sign with anyone, ask what in their close would surface a transaction that never arrived, and get the answer as a step in a process rather than a reassurance.
The Result, Stated Without Flattery
The books were corrected. The quarter that had already gone out was still wrong when it went out.
Cash reporting after the repair showed a tighter position than the pre-repair numbers had. The hire stayed, because it turned out to be supportable once the real figures were visible, though that was fortunate rather than planned. The equipment purchase would probably have waited a quarter.
No money was recovered beyond the duplicate payment, and nothing about the underlying business improved. The company traded a false picture for an accurate one, which is valuable because every decision downstream runs on it, and worth less than it sounds if the accurate picture is one nobody wanted to see.
Another company running the same check might find nothing at all. That is a good outcome too, and it is the more common one.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I tell whether my bank feed is currently importing everything?
Pull last month's bank statement and count the transactions on it. Then count the transactions in that account's register for the same date range. The two numbers should match. If they do not, the difference is your answer, and it takes a few minutes with no accounting judgment required.
My reconciliation balances every month. Does that mean nothing is missing?
No. A reconciliation confirms that the net of what you recorded matches the bank's net change over the period. Missing deposits and missing payments of similar size offset each other, so a reconciliation can tie while entire days are absent from the register. Balance testing and completeness testing are different tests, and most closes only run the first one.
Should I let the feed backfill after I reconnect it?
Be careful with it. If you have already entered the missing activity by hand, a backfill can import the same transactions again and produce duplicates that are harder to unwind than the original gap. Define the gap, enter the missing items from the bank statements, reconcile, then reconnect with a deliberate start date and verify the first week of new imports manually.
Does an outside bookkeeper prevent this?
Not by itself. An outside provider working from the same connection can miss the same silence unless its close process specifically tests for completeness. When you evaluate one, ask how they detect missing transactions and what happens in their workflow when a feed goes quiet. The process answer matters more than the firm's size or tenure.
If your close ends when the reconciliation balances, add the count check to it this month and see what comes back. You can browse accountants and fractional CFOs on Sam's List who handle monthly bookkeeping for growing businesses.
About the author: Kimberly Green is cofounder of Sam’s List, a directory and matching platform for financial professionals.
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