Relay statement to QuickBooks or Xero: bank feed, CSV and OFX statements, PDFs and tie-out

Relay business accounts are common with small businesses that split money across several checking accounts. Relay gives you a bank feed and per-statement files in three formats, so the bookkeeping job is mostly picking the right route for each month and making sure every sub-account is covered once, not twice.

What Relay gives you

• Bank feed to QuickBooks Online. Settled transactions from Relay checking and savings accounts are pulled into QuickBooks every few hours. You connect from QuickBooks: Bank accounts → Connect accounts, search for "Relay Financial", sign in with Relay credentials and pick the accounts. You need an Administrator or Manager role in Relay and a desktop browser (Relay: integrating with QuickBooks Online for bank feeds, updated Aug 11, 2026).
• Bank feed to Xero. Settled checking and savings transactions sync every three hours, starting around 2:00 a.m. ET. Relay says to start the connection from Relay (Settings → Integrations → Xero → Connect), not from Xero, or the feed won't be created correctly (Relay: integrating with Xero for bank feeds, updated Aug 11, 2026).
• Monthly statements as PDF, CSV or OFX. On the web, go to Settings → Account Statements, tick the statements you want, click Export X Statements and choose PDF, CSV or OFX. You can tick Combine into one file, but the combined export is PDF only. The mobile app offers PDF or CSV; OFX is web only (Relay: downloading and emailing bank statements, updated Aug 11, 2026).
• Custom transaction reports for any date range up to 366 days, as PDF or CSV, from Generate a Custom Report at the top of the same page (web only). Relay says plainly that a custom report is not a statement: if you need an opening and closing balance, download the standard statement (Relay: custom transaction report).

A client can also email a single statement to you from the web (PDF, CSV or OFX). The download link expires 4 hours after it's sent, so ask them to resend rather than forward an old email (Relay).

What Relay's help pages don't say

• How far back statements go. Relay says older statements sit on later pages of the list and closed accounts appear under the All tab (Relay); we didn't find a stated limit on how many years stay available. Download every month the books need now.
• What's in the statement CSV or OFX. Relay doesn't list the CSV columns, date format or sign convention, or say whether the OFX carries balances. Open the file before importing and check it against what QuickBooks or Xero expects (below).
• How far back a new feed goes. Neither feed page says how much history the first sync brings in. When resetting the Xero feed, Relay has you choose an import start date (Relay: resetting your Xero bank feed), but it doesn't say how far back that date can go. Check the earliest date that actually lands, and treat everything before it as a gap.
• QuickBooks Desktop. Relay says its QuickBooks bank feed supports QuickBooks Online only (Relay). Its pages don't mention a .qbo (Web Connect) download. See can QuickBooks Desktop import a PDF bank statement.

Which route for which months

• Going forward: the bank feed. It's Relay's own feature and needs no files.
• Catch-up months before the feed: the statement CSV or OFX for each month, imported only for dates before the feed's first transaction.
• Proof for each month: the PDF statement, one per sub-account. That's what you tie out to, whichever file you import.

Cards are a separate flow

Relay says card activity, including the Relay Visa Credit Card, doesn't come through the QuickBooks bank feed; it has a separate credit card integration (Relay). For Xero, Relay says credit card accounts and debit card transactions sync through separate integration flows (Relay). Credit card statements and reports live on Settings → Credit Statements, a different page from checking and savings (Relay). If card spending is missing from the books, check that integration and that page first.

QuickBooks Online

• After connecting, create a matching bank account in the Chart of Accounts for each Relay account you sync, and map them in the integration's Manage panel. Pending transactions don't sync; only settled ones do. Renaming an account in Relay doesn't rename it in QuickBooks (Relay).
• For months before the feed, Intuit's manual upload takes a PDF or image statement in English, or a QBO, QFX or CSV file. A list file must be 350 KB or less, with 3 columns (Date, Description, Amount) or 4 (Date, Description, Credit, Debit), up to 1,000 lines per upload (Intuit: manually upload transactions into QuickBooks Online, updated Aug 24, 2026). Intuit's list doesn't name OFX, so use Relay's CSV for QuickBooks unless you've tested the OFX file.
• Intuit says the file should start at least one day before your oldest QuickBooks transaction in that account (Intuit). Upload only dates before the feed started. See duplicate transactions after a bank upload.
• Intuit also says accountants can't connect a bank account for their clients (Intuit: connect bank and credit card accounts, updated Oct 1, 2026). The Relay connection needs Relay credentials with an Administrator or Manager role, so expect the client to do that step.

Xero

• Choose the Relay accounts to sync when you connect; you can change the selection later under Bank Feeds (Relay). A manual Sync now is under Settings → Integrations → Xero → Manage, and only settled transactions sync (Relay: manually syncing your Xero bank feed, updated Aug 11, 2026).
• If the feed breaks, Relay's reset is: disconnect each Relay account in Xero (Accounting → Bank accounts → Manage account → Disconnect), disconnect Xero in Relay, reconnect, then re-map accounts and choose an import start date. To avoid duplicates, Relay says to set that date to the day after the last transaction Xero already has. Xero keeps historical transactions after a disconnect. You need a Standard or Advisor role in Xero (Relay).
• Relay Financial is on Xero's list of banks with validated PDF extraction for selected statement types (checked 26 Oct 2026). Xero's PDF import is for US and Canada organizations, not the Xero Ledger plan; files must be English, 35 MB or less, up to 100 pages, at least 200 DPI, not password protected, one file per bank account. Xero also says to prefer OFX over PDF if your bank offers it (Xero Central: import a PDF bank statement), and Relay does. Don't use Relay's combined PDF here: it can merge several accounts into one file.
• For a CSV, Xero needs at least Date and Amount, with money in positive and money out negative in one column, and no opening or closing balance columns (Xero Central: import a bank statement in CSV format). Relay doesn't document its CSV layout, so check columns and signs first.
• Xero treats lines matching ones already in Xero as duplicates and won't import them (Xero Central), but feed and file lines can differ in wording, so import only the months the account doesn't already have.

More detail: how to import bank statements into Xero from a PDF and importing transactions older than your Xero bank feed.

Tie out each month before you import

1. For each Relay account: opening balance + deposits − withdrawals = closing balance on that account's statement, to the cent.
2. Chain the months: each closing balance equals the next statement's opening balance for the same account.
3. Sum the CSV rows for the month and compare them with the statement's net change. Transfers between Relay sub-accounts show up in both accounts, so check each side lands in the right ledger account.
4. Spot-check the first and last days of the period and the largest few items against the PDF.

The full method is in check a bank statement PDF is complete before you import it. Our free tie-out checker runs in your browser and shows the row where a CSV stops balancing. Then reconcile one statement at a time, oldest first; if QuickBooks says the beginning balance is off, see beginning balance doesn't match.

Client also banks with Mercury? See Mercury statement to QuickBooks or Xero.

Where LedgerReady fits

For most Relay months, the bank feed or Relay's own CSV and OFX statements are the right tool. We're useful when all you have is the PDF statements: a client who sends PDFs and won't share account access, a closed account, or months you need to tie out to the printed balances. If you'd rather not convert and check each month yourself, LedgerReady turns digital statement PDFs into a QBO file, a Xero CSV, a plain CSV and a tie-out sheet showing every month matches its opening and closing balance. It costs $15 per statement-month, and we aim to deliver within 12 hours. Tie-out guarantee: if the output doesn't reconcile to the statement's opening and closing balances and we can't fix it, you don't pay for that statement.

Bank menus change; labels here were accurate to our knowledge in Oct 2026, so check your bank's help pages if something differs.