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Xero bank feeds: what each one covers, and where it stops

Every bank, card and platform below has a page: what Xero's native feed does for it, and where it stops. Some have no feed at all. Most have one that lapses, breaks or backfills only so far. Either way, StatementClear posts the missing transactions into Xero as live feed lines - not another CSV to import. Find your account below.

How a Xero bank feed connects, and which kind yours is

Three different things get called a Xero bank feed, and which one an account gets decides almost everything about how it behaves. It's worth knowing which you're on before you try to fix one.

A direct feed, which the bank sets up
You start it inside the bank's own online banking rather than inside Xero, and the bank pushes transactions across on a schedule it controls. This is the Australian pattern, and it's how NAB, CommBank, ANZ and Westpac all work. Direct feeds are the sturdiest of the three, and they're also the ones where the bank, not Xero, decides which of your accounts qualify, so an account type the bank doesn't list has no feed to apply for at all. Setting one up usually needs Administrator rights at the bank, which the person doing the books frequently doesn't hold.
An open banking connection, which you authorise
The UK pattern. You start it in Xero, get bounced to the bank to approve it, and come back. The catch is regulatory rather than technical: consent expires every ninety days and has to be reauthorised, so an open banking feed stops on a timer whether or not anything is wrong. Nobody will call that an incident, because it isn't one. It's why a NatWest or Tide feed that worked all quarter is suddenly empty.
An aggregator connection, for everything else
A third party sits between the bank and Xero and scrapes or polls for transactions. It reaches institutions the other two don't, and it's the most fragile of the three, because a change at the bank that nobody announced can stop it silently. Most platform and wallet accounts that connect at all connect this way.

All three share one limit that matters more than the differences between them. A feed runs forward from the day it starts working, so whatever it missed while it was down, lapsed or not yet connected stays missing until somebody puts it there another way.

Which banks feed into Xero

Xero has feed arrangements with supported banks chiefly in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, and the live list is the one inside Xero's own Add Bank Account screen. The more useful question is usually the narrower one, because coverage is decided per account rather than per bank: a business account at a supported bank can feed perfectly while a personal or joint account at the same bank can't connect at all. Three groups are worth separating.

  • Accounts with a working feed and a documented edge

    The majority. The feed exists, it runs, and it stops somewhere specific: one currency per connection, a twelve-month backfill limit, a card type the bank excludes, a plan tier that doesn't include it. Nothing is broken, and the ledger is still short.

  • Accounts whose feed lapses or stalls

    Feeds on ninety-day consent, feeds that need a privilege somebody has to grant at the bank, and feeds that go quiet for weeks at a time across whole client bases. These are the ones that leave a dated gap rather than a permanent hole, which is the harder kind to spot, because the account reconciles again the moment the feed comes back and the missing weeks sit there unnoticed.

  • Accounts with no feed at all, and no prospect of one

    A bank account held in a country Xero has no arrangement in, money held on a platform that isn't a bank, an invoice finance facility or a lending platform. Xero's documented answer for these is the manual import, every month, forever.

Whichever group an account falls into, the residue is identical: the bank has the transactions, the statement has the transactions, and Xero doesn't.

Xero bank feeds, answered

Xero has direct feeds with supported banks chiefly in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, and the list is available from the Add Bank Account screen inside Xero. Coverage is per account rather than per bank: a business account at a supported bank may feed while a personal or joint account at the same bank cannot connect at all.

Xero's documented fallback is to export a statement and import it manually as CSV, OFX, QBO, QFX or QIF. That works, but it is a repeat job every month, and the importer verifies nothing about the file it is handed: not that the period was complete, not that the closing balance agrees. The alternative is to post those same statements through Xero's Bank Feeds API, so the account is fed rather than imported into.

Feed eligibility depends on the account, not just the bank. Account type, plan tier, card type and country all decide it, which is why one account can feed perfectly while another at the same provider has no feed available.

Open the Accounting menu and select Bank accounts. Every account you've added is listed there, connected or not, and the menu icon beside an account is where you'll find Add Bank Account for a new one and View Status Updates for the health of an existing feed. There isn't a separate bank feeds screen, which is why the setting is easy to hunt for.

Xero's own bank feeds documentation says transactions appear in the account roughly every twelve hours, and a feed can be refreshed by hand to pull the latest lines in rather than waiting for the next cycle. So an account a few hours behind is behaving normally, and an account weeks behind isn't.

Two separate lists answer that, and they answer different questions. Xero's status page covers the platform, and Xero's disruptions to bank feeds page covers known feed outages by region. A quiet status page alongside a listed disruption is the normal combination rather than a contradiction, so check both.

Not through the manual import, which accepts CSV, OFX, QBO, QFX and QIF only. A PDF has to be converted to one of those first, which in the US and Canada is what Xero's own Hubdoc extraction does, or read by an application that posts the lines into Xero through the Bank Feeds API.

Guides

What to do when a feed stops, and what Xero's importer will accept when there is no feed at all.

Whichever account is short, the fix is the same

Upload the statement you already export and StatementClear posts it into Xero as live bank feed lines, deduped against what is already there and checked against the statement's own running balance.

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