Coding rules run on arrival
A descriptor the firm has already decided about is filled in before anyone opens the queue. Rules come in two confidences: one fills the coding, the other proposes it and waits.
The QuickBooks Online bank feed
Work the feed where your AI can reach it.
A transaction sitting in QuickBooks' For Review queue cannot be read, coded, or asked about by any software but QuickBooks. Stage the account in Zeno instead and the same month becomes work your rules, your client's history, and your assistant can all do.
Bank connections includedStatement import on every planNothing posts without approval
The API has no bank feedNo entity for the For Review queue. No call that accepts, matches, or excludes a line. No CRUD for bank rules. Intuit has confirmed this in its own developer forums.
It is a business decisionIntuit pays Plaid and Yodlee per access for that data. Republishing it through a free API would mean paying for every developer's bulk pull. Business decisions do not get fixed in the next release.
So the queue has to live somewhereEither a vendor signs in as a user and drives the web interface, or the transactions are staged outside QuickBooks and posted in finished. Zeno does the second.
What the gap costs
By the time Zeno can see it, the work is done.
Zeno reads the QuickBooks register, so it is not blind to the money. It is blind to the decision. A line in QuickBooks' own feed becomes visible only once somebody has accepted it — at which point it is a posted entry that a person already categorized.
The categorizing is the work. Automating it means holding the transaction before that moment, not after it.
- QUICKBOOKS' FEEDLine downloads into For Review.
Invisible to the API. Nothing outside QuickBooks can list it, code it, or answer a question about it.
- A PERSONSomebody opens Banking and accepts it.
Payee and category set by hand, one row at a time, in the interface. This is the step you wanted help with.
- ZENONow it is a register entry Zeno can read.
Useful for reporting, questions, and cleanup. Too late to have saved anyone the coding.
Stage it here instead
One connection puts the whole month in reach.
Connect the bank to Zeno, or import the statement file your bank already hands you — the queue cannot tell them apart. Either way the lines land outside the ledger, where every part of the system can work them before a single entry reaches QuickBooks.
Matching runs before you code
Every staged line is compared against the register first. A cheque somebody hand-entered last Tuesday is held back and linked, not posted a second time.
History answers as evidence
Ask what a descriptor should be and the answer is the rule that matches it, or how this counterparty has actually been coded, with the line count and the most recent date behind it.
An assistant can work the month
The queue is addressable by tool, so Claude or ChatGPT can filter it, code a batch, pair transfers, and hand back a plan for a person to read.
Receipts meet the charge
Ask the assistant to match a folder of receipts against staged card activity; the approved document is attached to the transaction that posts.
What posts carries its history
Every entry keeps the run that created it, the approval that let it through, and a reversal path that knows what it made.
None of it reaches a line in QuickBooks' own queue.See what a bank feed does in Zeno, step by step →
The trade, stated
Two things this costs you. Both worth knowing before you connect.
Connecting a bank is friction, and there is no version of this where we pretend otherwise. Here is the rest of it.
One feed per account
Feeding an account in Zeno means turning that account's bank feed off in QuickBooks. Leave both on and every transaction arrives twice — once as the entry Zeno posted, once as a downloaded line waiting in the Banking tab for somebody to accept. That is two review queues for one month of activity.
Zeno cannot see which accounts QuickBooks is feeding — that is not in the API either — so it cannot check for you. Look before you connect.
The cleared column stays yours
Nothing Zeno posts arrives ticked as cleared. The QuickBooks Online API has no reconciliation interface and no writable cleared field, so no application can set it. Reconciling happens in QuickBooks, by a person, exactly as it would for entries typed in by hand.
Accepting a line in QuickBooks' own feed does mark it cleared. That is the one thing moving the feed here gives up.
QuickBooks Desktop is different. It does allow the cleared flag to be set, so Zeno for QuickBooks Desktop can mark a transaction cleared, uncleared or pending. It still cannot finish a reconciliation — there is no way to record the statement date and ending balance, so a person completes that in the Reconcile window — and transfers cannot be flagged this way at all.
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