Bank balance off QBO

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I thought I'd do a tutorial today on something that I do quite often, and that is fixing books that are a little bit of a mess. And I'm going to take you through a few of the things that I normally see that a lot of times will bring a customer to me, and then I'll show you a couple ways of fixing that. Not that I don't want customers, but these are the things that can be frustrating in your file. So let's go to my sample file. And somebody will call me up and say, you know, I saw your blog or I read your post and I'm having the same issue in my company file. What's the issue you're having? When I go to reconcile, my beginning balance doesn't work. So I will come over to reconcile, and I'm in the accountant's version. I'll come into reconcile and I'll see that, okay, there you go, it's off by $186.99. Now this is your bank reconciliation, and I do have another video on this with a simple change where somebody changed a transaction and it unreconciled, so they just have to click and reconcile. This one's going to be a little bit different though. So we come in here and there's a few things wrong. One says that one of the problems is it's reconciled in the register and it shouldn't be. So that's something that we're going to want to fix. And the other is we've got a couple of deleted transactions. So this one's simple. The reconciliation, if we go back To the screen was reconciled as of 3/31, so a transaction dated 4/7 couldn't have cleared the bank. So I just can click here, and this is just like that other video. Click here, save. That's going to change the problem that I'm off by now. I'm off by $198.64, which is the total of these two transactions. Well, there's nowhere to click here to make them open up and magically come back. So how do I fix it? I'll click View and I'll come in to see, well, what happened here. Obviously I'm the only one using it. I like to use Show All. I want to see what the original transaction looked like. So this was a transaction that was reconciled eventually, and it was an automatic payment of $11.65 on 3/21. So to put that back, I need to actually put the transaction back in. As on 3/21, there was a transfer paying the credit card, basically automatic payment thank you is usually a credit card payment. It's to the Chase credit card account. One of the problems that they have here is that they took the default. So when you go to download from the bank, and I'll show you here in another window, when you go to download from the bank, sometimes QuickBooks guesses, and it doesn't always guess right. Machine learning is just in its beginning stage. So here's an American Express card payment that's hitting my bank, Bank of America. It's in the Bank of America bank feed, and it's being transferred to uncategorized asset. Well, if I'm paying my American Express card, then that should be a payment to the American Express account, not to an uncategorized asset. So you want to make sure you post these to the right categories as you drop them in from the bank feed, or I tell people when it hits the credit card, just let it sit and then wait till the other side of it hits the bank and then enter the payment from the bank to the credit card, then go back to the second— go back to the credit card bank feed screen and then just download it. So going back to our little issue here, I need to enter this $11.65 payment to this credit card on 3/21. So this is in my bank account. So what I need to do is I need to go back to— I'm in the Chase credit card account, so I need to show that $1,165 on 3/21 as a payment. So the payment would come from the checking account. I want to make sure that that $1,165 isn't posted to something else. So I'll use my search bar to make sure when I go to put it in, I don't want to duplicate it. And if it's already cleared the bank side, I don't want to duplicate it in the credit card side. So I just want to check and make sure that, A, in fact it's been deleted perfectly. So $1,165, and it should come out of Bank of America to pay Chase. And there's the transfer. So it's here, but it's not cleared. Let's see if we can find it. So here it is, Bank of America to Chase. So it was corrected and reentered, right? So it was $322. So now I need to go back and find that transaction, right? So I know it's there, and it's probably not cleared, One of the ways you can find it is we'll go back into that reconciliation. I know it was— I was looking for $11.65, so let's just go into the reconciliation and see if I can find it. Is it in here? And there it is, it's right there, just needs to be re-entered. So what I'm going to do to fix that— and there's the $186.99— I'm going to go into the register here, I'm going to find the $11.65, here it is, and I'm gonna make it reconciled. So I forced it to be reconciled because now it's got the right category account. It's Bank of America paid Chase, right? So let's go here and save that. Now let's go back to our bank reconciliation window, and now I should be off by less, right? So let's go take a look. And there's the 2, my corrected transaction replacing the deleted one. Now I have to do the same thing with this $186.99 because that's here. I know it's in there. It probably was posted to uncategorized and somebody realized, where the heck is it? I know I paid it. So let's do the same thing. Let's go into that register, find that $186.99, which is again a payment on Bank of America, and reconcile it. So now we'll go back to reconciling. I'll hit save— I'll close without saving so that way it'll remove all the charges. Okay. Close without saving. Close without saving. I always go for the green box and I shouldn't. Now I'm okay. I'm back to my beginning balance being correct. So that's one of the things that I see when I help somebody with a bank problem, when their beginning balance is off. If it's been deleted, the transaction has been deleted, it may be corrected. In that case, it was corrected, which is why I try not to do the transfers, because you're kind of stuck if you have that uncategorized asset. I usually try to put it as a check and then transfer to another, another account. You can do the transfer, it works too, but It's sometimes a little bit more forgiving if you use a bank, a check, or a deposit. You can hear my dog snoring behind me. So that's how I fix that. Briefly, I'm just going to go in to show you what I would normally do to help somebody out, to take a look at what they've— how their books look and see how things are in their records. So sometimes I'll come in and maybe they have a negative balance in their Bank of America card. I'd ask because they've got 2 Bank of America accounts. Oh, they got a bank account and a Bank of America account. They've got a barter account at zero. That's good. They've got another bank account here, so they've got a couple of Bank of America accounts. That might be an issue. Might be they've got duplication or undid a bank register bank feed and reconnected and added a new account. They've still got an uncategorized asset. We would want to fix that because I know that's that Chase card, and it's a different one. So I want to make sure that it's coming out of the bank, but I want to also make sure that there's not two of these. So on this date, I want to make sure that there's not two on one twenty-one. Maybe it cleared on the bank side and it didn't clear here. So I want to make sure because this should have cleared on the bank side. So that's something I'll have to investigate. So I go through the balance sheet basically. I would come through here and anything I see that's uncategorized, I will definitely want to look at and say what's going on here. That doesn't seem right. I would check their accounts payable, accounts receivable. Here's a major issue that you've got this gigantic balance in opening balance equity. It's an account that's there. To help you figure out how to— when you put your balance sheet in, it's an offset account, and then when the balance sheet balances, it's zero. So then you wouldn't see that, but that's what that account is for. So there's a major balance in there. Typically that comes when somebody hooks up their bank account and the beginning balance gets dumped into there. So that's the case here. This bank account got hooked up on 3 months after— that seems kind of odd, the date there, but it's created by QuickBooks Online to adjust for a balance deletion. So something got balanced— deleted, and they created this transaction maybe on a closed account. So I'd have to find out more about that to see exactly what's happening in there, why that amount was in there, and why it got stuck to that account. Category. So I would check also to make sure that everything's reconciled. I would go into their accounts and see their bank accounts and see if they're reconciled, resume reconciling. You know, I want to know when was the last time it was reconciled and if I can get it up to date. I would also go into their profit and loss and check their records there and see— this is a sample file, so it doesn't have a lot— but to see where they've got all their transactions. And actually, this is a This would be a very bad account if you had this happen in your bank record and your company records. So it's kind of a few little overview tips for, A, fixing a bank transaction or several that are deleted and how to find them and make sure they're actually— always take that step to make sure they're not actually in the books but not showing somewhere, or they're just hanging still waiting to be reconciled. Those transactions show up if you delete something that's already reconciled. And I can tell you that most people say, well, I didn't delete it, but you deleted it. And there's a warning box, but people just, you know, there's so many boxes that pop up on QuickBooks that they just disregard the box. So I hope that's helpful. I know I went through that fairly quickly, but basically you just need to find the transactions go into their check register and re-reconcile them if they need to be, or make the correction, re-enter them if they were really deleted and they really weren't in there, to get the records back to zero and making the beginning balance back to what it was supposed to be. So I hope this post was helpful, and if you have any further questions or comments or any ideas that you might want a blog post on or a problem you're having with QuickBooks, please reach out to me. I'm pretty active on Facebook. Thank you for watching. Bye now.