A bank feed connects your account through open banking so transactions arrive automatically, usually the next day, and rules then categorise them for you. This is where the time saving actually comes from — not the software existing, but the rules being set up properly. A rule can say that anything from a named fuel supplier is motor expenses, or that a recurring payment matching a description is a specific supplier bill, and once it is in place those transactions arrive pre-coded and need a click. Set up well, a sole trader’s weekly bookkeeping drops to a few minutes. Set up badly, or not at all, you are hand-coding several hundred transactions a quarter and will stop doing it by August. Open banking connections need re-authorising periodically, which is worth knowing before a feed silently stops.