How to Bulk Delete Multiple Bank Transactions in QBO

Hello everyone. Today I am going to look at how to mass delete banking transactions. Unfortunately, there's no good way to go in and mass or bulk delete Multiple transactions in QuickBooks that are not bank transactions. I will show you a way that might make it a little bit easier, but for the most part you have to go in in individually and delete each one. And hopefully QuickBooks Online will provide some functionality in the future to make this easier. But for now, really if it is not, if it has not been downloaded to your bank account through online banking, then you can't actually delete transactions. So there are multiple reasons that you might want to delete a group of banking transactions. You may have had some erroneous transactions download to your bank account. Sometimes they're duplicated or they're just not relevant. You might want to completely overwrite your file, create a whole new file on top of an existing file. And therefore you just might want to delete all of your transactions. One note, you have to be very careful when you're deleting transactions because there is history. And if you have already prepared financial statements, statements and file tax returns based on the information in your QuickBooks file, then you do not want to go in and delete those transactions unless you have a backup of all the reports elsewhere. And you would want your financial statements and your detailed general ledger, trial balance, all of those reports.

To back everything up.

Without further ado, let's look at how to delete multiple banking transactions. So you'd simply go to your bank transactions from the left hand side.

And you'll see here I only have a couple of transactions in the for review section. But if I go to categorized, I actually have multiple transactions here. You'll see I have 206 transactions that can be deleted. So in my case I am actually completely overriding this file. So I want to delete all of the transactions. This is a two step process. The first thing we're going to do is undo all of these transactions and then they will go back to the for review section and from there we will delete them permanently. So let's start the process.

In some cases you'll see here that the transactions are limited to 50 or 100 and to change that you can simply go to the gear section and show the number of transactions that you want to see on this page. So, so again it could just be 50 at a time or you can go as high as 300. I've chosen 300. I have 206 transactions. So it's going to show me all the transactions that were entered for the corporate bank account. So now what I do is because I want to select all transactions, I simply click here and it is going to give me a little black bar that says undo all of the transactions. Alternatively, I will close this. I can choose a filter of dates. So I can simply choose yesterday, this year, last quarter, etc. Etc. Or I can do a custom range and enter the dates that I want to do. So I'm going to go back and do all dates.

Select all, and then I am going to undo these transactions. It gives me a note. I've already reconciled these transactions. Again, you want to be very careful and make sure that the transactions you were deleting are not going to affect reports, especially reports that have already been finalized and submitted to you tax authorities. And this includes Cra, Remini Quebec and your GSTHST reports. Okay, so let's click on continue. I'm okay with this.

Note because I'm deleting 200 transactions. This will take a little bit of time.

It didn't let me delete some other, some a handful of transactions because they came from the credit card. When we go to the credit card to do this, that's when those transactions will be deleted. And you'll see the credit card over here. Let's go to for review.

And now you'll see all the transactions appear here.

Now I just want to get rid of all of these transactions. So I'll go to the checkbox up here. It will select all of the transactions and again you can choose, you can filter out the ones that you want and the ones that you want to keep. So again I want to delete all of these transactions. So I am simply going to click on exclude.

And all of these transactions are gone. And they will also be gone from your books. They will no longer be here. And this can save you a lot of time for again, for transactions that have been downloaded through your bank. So at least for those you don't have to go in and individually delete each one. If I go to my excluded tab, you'll see.

All the transactions that I have deleted here. I still have the option to undo this. So I would leave them here for a little while until you are sure that everything is fine. Once you have ascertained that your books are good, that you haven't made any mistakes in deleting the transactions, you you can actually go in and then permanently delete these.

So that is really how deleting mass transactions work. You can also do it with a separate account and again, any account for which transactions were downloaded into the banking area of QuickBooks Online.

So let's do this with a credit card as well.

So I'm going to go to categorized.

Here. You'll see that I have 442 transactions. I can only see 300 at a time. So I will have to delete these in two steps.

So I will click undo.

Save message.

And now I still have 142 transactions. So let's go ahead and delete those as well.

And you'll see there's nothing left in this categorize tab we'll go back to for review.

And similarly, I'm going to go in, check all the transactions and then exclude them.

Now you have to make sure that you do page two or the transactions that are still left over that exceed in my case, 300.

And we're all done. We have deleted all of the bank and credit card transactions.

Now you'll still, if you are completely overwriting this file and you want to delete all the transactions or you simply want to delete all the transactions pertaining to a specific fiscal year period, you have to go and determine what transactions are remaining. So the first thing, the next thing I would do is go to reports, go to your balance sheet. And in my case I am going to click all dates run report.

And you'll see I still have some transactions left.

So what you can do is just go in, click on.

Each account. You'll see I have a bunch of journal entries that need to be deleted. And unfortunately these need to be done one by one.

And that's in the bank account, you'll see in the accounts receivable, you will have all of the invoices and payments.

And so on. So a slightly easier way to do some of these transactions rather than going in again one by one, and you want to put aside some time for that is you can go to what's called the account register. And to go to the account register you go to the chart of accounts.

Click on in this case, let's do the corporate bank account.

You double click on it and it will show you all the transactions that are still here that have not been deleted.

There's still 163 transactions, many of which would not have been entered through the banking delay download. And so in order to do that, you simply click on the transaction, click on delete, and then it just one less click than having to go and individually open up each transaction and then delete it from there.

So once you have deleted all the transactions from one account, you would go to the next account and see what has a balance. This type of deletion of transactions can only be done for balance sheet accounts and balance sheet accounts that are designated in your home currency. In this case it's Canadian dollars. For profit and loss accounts, you will still have to go in individually and delete each transaction. So if we click on for example Incorporation costs, I can double click on that. I have one transaction here, I can just go ahead and delete it. Then I'll go back to my chart of accounts and just continue to do this all the way down through my balance sheet accounts. And then for the profit and loss accounts I would go to reports, click on the profit and loss, click on all dates.

And then go into whatever the remaining transactions are and delete each one of those individually.

So I hope this helps. It is understandably frustrating again that you can't go in and bulk delete transactions in QuickBooks Online. I have seen this expressed on message boards and community forums, but hopefully QuickBooks Online will introduce this at some point in the near future.

Thanks for watching. If this was helpful, please subscribe and like. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section and I will get back to you as soon as possible and have a great day.