I think downloading credit card transactions is actually more useful (worth the time & effort), to more people, than downloading bank transactions.

Why? Because with a credit card account, most people have entered none of the month's transactions before they get their statement. With no transactions entered, downloading them saves a lot of data entry. Also, you probably use your credit card repeatedly at the same vendors--the local gas station, Wal Mart, grocery store, auto repair shop, tire shop, etc.--which makes it easy to have rules in place to put expenses in the downloaded transactions into the right accounts.

Bank account downloads?  Not as useful. In a typical farm business, you will have already entered checks and deposits in your accounting system for many of the month's transactions, so downloading may only add a few that you have not already entered. We print many of our checks out of QuickBooks...which means they've already been entered.

And you should *always* enter deposits manually--don't let the bank download enter them for you (in most cases, at least). A downloaded deposit transaction does not contain the detailed income information you need to have recorded. (Pages 18 and 19 of my book, Online Banking, Transaction Downloading, and Online Bill Payment in QuickBooks has a full discussion of this and related details.)

As for downloaded transactions in general, in QuickBooks it takes a while to get all the "rules" created to get downloaded transactions posted where you want them. Sort of like any new technology or practice, it takes a while to get the hang of it before you are comfortable with how the rules work and can set up new ones on the fly. (You'll always have transactions with new vendors for which you don't yet have a rule established.)

In my opinion, in a farm business, transaction downloading of all kinds is best for people who barely get transactions entered manually--which explains why I think credit card (and debit card) transaction downloading can be worth the time it requires, for any of us. (The only reason we don't do it here, is that the major credit cards we use don't support it.)