Xero bank feed not working: what to check, in order
A Xero bank feed usually stops for one of four reasons: the open banking consent expired, the provider is having an outage, something changed at the bank, or the account was never eligible for a feed. The first three are fixable from inside Xero. The fourth is not, and no amount of reconnecting will change it.
Work through these in order
Most guidance jumps straight to disconnect and reconnect. That fixes one of the four causes and, done on top of transactions you already imported by hand, creates duplicates you then have to unpick. Two minutes of checking first saves that.
- Check Xero's status page and its bank feed disruptions page. If your bank is listed, nothing you do at your end will help and reconnecting may make it worse.
- Check the age of the connection. UK open banking consent expires every 90 days, and an expired consent is the single most common cause. Xero shows a renew prompt against the account, which is easy to scroll past.
- Log in to the bank directly. Pending terms and conditions, a security block or an unread alert will silently stop a feed until someone clicks through them in the bank's own interface.
- Only then disconnect and reconnect, and note the date of the last statement line first so you know exactly what gap you are left with.
Whatever fixes it, reconnecting runs the feed forward from the reconnection. The stretch between the day it stopped and the day you noticed does not backfill. That gap is the part people forget, and it is why an account still will not reconcile after a successful reconnect.
Cause 1: open banking consent expired
UK open banking requires the connection between your bank and Xero to be reauthorised every 90 days. It is a regulatory requirement, not a fault, and it will happen again every quarter for as long as the account exists.
The symptom is a feed that worked perfectly and then simply stopped producing lines on a specific day, with no error anywhere obvious. The fix is to renew the connection from the bank account in Xero. The recurring cost is that somebody has to notice, on every account, every quarter.
Cause 2: the provider is having an outage
Feeds run through third-party aggregators as well as direct bank agreements, and both break. Xero maintains a disruptions page listing known issues by region, and outages there have historically run for weeks rather than hours for some banks.
There is nothing to fix at your end. The practical question is what you do with the books while it is out, which is the same question the fourth cause raises, and it has the same answer.
Cause 3: something changed at the bank
- New terms and conditions waiting to be accepted in online banking.
- A password or security credential change that invalidated the stored connection.
- Multi-factor authentication that needs refreshing against the feed.
- A change of account type, sort code or product that the feed does not follow across.
Each of these is fixed at the bank first and in Xero second. Reconnecting before clearing the bank-side block just fails again.
Cause 4: the account was never eligible
This is the one that no amount of troubleshooting resolves, and it is more common than the other three combined. The feed is not broken; it never existed, and the connect-your-bank screen simply has nothing for that account.
- A personal or joint account being used for business. Most feeds cover business accounts only.
- A plan tier below the one the feed requires, which is how a free business account ends up with no feed.
- A card that is not the primary card, a corporate card, or a card issued outside the covered market.
- A bank outside Xero's feed regions, which is most of the world outside the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada.
- A payment platform balance rather than a bank account, where the bank feed only ever sees the net payout.
Xero's own documented answer for all of these is to export a statement and import it by hand, in CSV, OFX, QIF or QBO. That works, and it is the same job every month, for every account, with no duplicate detection and no check that the file was complete.
What to do about the gap, whichever cause it was
Three of the four causes leave you holding a period of transactions the feed will never deliver, and the fourth leaves you holding all of them, permanently. In both cases the bank still gives you a statement; the problem is getting it into Xero as something better than a manual import.
StatementClear posts those statements into Xero through the same Bank Feeds API the native feeds use, so the lines arrive as feed lines. Overlapping uploads are deduplicated against what is already in the account, which is what makes it safe to post a period the feed later recovers, and the running balance is checked against the statement before anything reaches the ledger.
Start with the account that is stuck: it may already have a page covering exactly where its feed falls short.
Stop importing Tide statements. Feed them instead.
StatementClear posts the statements you already export into Xero as live bank feed lines, deduped and balance-checked before anything reaches the ledger.