Linda Artesani shows how to fix a credit card payment recorded twice in QuickBooks Online, both entries stuck in Uncategorized Assets. The fix: void the duplicate, save it, and re-reconcile. To prevent it, create the payment in the credit card register first, then transfer from checking.
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Hi there. Happy Sunday. Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So for today's post, I thought I would do one on something I see quite often. And it's an error that I find maybe with some new users of QuickBooks. And even sometimes some bookkeepers can struggle with this particular problem. And I thought I would go over it. Basically, it's when you pay your credit card, you pay your credit card, and it hits the bank and the bank feed first in the credit card side. And maybe it'll come in, it'll say uncategorized asset, and you're in a hurry going through the bank feeds, And you click, click, click, and you put it through. And then maybe a day or so goes by and it hits the bank side and you don't match it, even though you should, because it's one transaction. And you click, click, click, and you put it in maybe an expense category. Or I've seen that— I've seen people break it out into all the same expenses that it had already been put in with the— in the credit card side, or they just drop it into uncategorized asset again. And now you've got the same payment twice. And then you go and reconcile and you reconcile both sides, but they never really connect. And so you've got it in twice. So let me take you to my screen. So here's my QV Community Live sample file. I'm going to take you to— let's take you right here to the payment. So here's the payment on the credit card side. It's posting to uncategorized asset. You know, your, your accountant or your tax professional may have spotted it and said, what is this? And when you do it this way, you end up having it in twice because this technically should be not the Uncategorized Asset account. It should be your checking account here, right? So this is reconciled. And we'll quickly go over to the bank side. And this is your bank side, the checking side. It's also reconciled. Here's the other transaction, but it's reconciled also to Uncategorized Asset. So if we click on Reports here, we'll go to the balance sheet itself. Go into balance sheet here, and I'll do last year because this was 2018 transaction. And if I come into— where is it— categorized asset account, you're going to see here that— let's see if I can get it to populate— it's in and it's out. So the net is zero. It's $200 because there's $200 in there as well. But it's an in and out transaction. But it's in here twice, right? So this is an expense and this is a credit card credit. It's another thing that you do see with QuickBooks Online. So how am I going to fix this? It's all reconciled. I want to fix it. And your gut will say, well, I'll just come over here. And I'm going to put the bank account in, right? Because it shouldn't be Uncategorized Assets. I'm going to just put the checking account in and save and close it. Now it should be fixed, right? It's reconciled. Yes, I know it's reconciled. So it should be fixed, right? It took it out of the Uncategorized Asset account, and I can go over here. And now I'll put this into the credit card side. This is— I see this all the time. So this is something that's very, very common. I just see it a lot on records. Okay, all fixed right now. I don't have anything other than that one $200 transaction in here that I would get rid of as well. So it's fixed, right? Well, not really. So now if I'm going to go over and reconcile my checking account now, and I'm going to go— I'll go to the credit card since it's here. And I'll just put in 0 here so I can go to the next month. I'll put 11/30/18 for my date. And then I'm going to start reconciling. And now all the transactions are reconciled. I shouldn't see anything in here. And here it shows that other side of one of the transactions. And it's not clearing the bank because there's 2 transactions. So it does make a mess. And sometimes this isn't discovered until you get way into the future. And you've got these things just kind of hanging. You don't really want to see anything hanging in your account. And this is something that is real important. So if you're reconciling your books— I'll put zero here as well. I'll do 11/30 here too. You just don't want to see a lot of stuff hanging in this account. So if you log in here and you're already into November and you're starting to see things hanging from July that shouldn't be here. And of course, now we've got this transaction payment from the web. So that's going to need to be fixed. Clearly, these payments that were received in the prior periods will need to be fixed as well. And I see this, and it could be a duplicate. There could be many reasons why these transactions are in here. But you really need to drill down into what they are. But for the credit card one, how are we going to fix this? So I have a couple ways you can fix it. One is I could just remove one of them and just delete it. So it's going to throw one of the bank recs off. And I mean, you have to get rid of the dual transaction, right? You can't have it in here twice. I could just come in here, remove this. I'm going to hit Edit. I'm going to hit More. And I'm going to— and I'm going to hit— well, we'll just hit Void for now, because that way it'll keep the transaction intact. So I don't think it voided. I think I always go for the green. Yes, I want to void it. So it's going to make it zero. Now I'll go Save for Later. Still, this checking account is okay, right? So if we went to the register, you're going to see That it's okay, because here's my payment, it's still in place. And we've removed the duplicate entry that was caused by using the credit card credit from the credit card transaction. But what about my credit card? How's that doing? Chase, I'm gonna hit reconcile. And it's off by that amount. And you're like, oh no, that's terrible. What happened? So in order to fix this, you can come up here and say try to fix it. And it's going to give you this. It's saying that this is reconciled, which is what you want. You want this zero transaction, right? I voided it. I want that to be reconciled. That's not my issue. My issue is I now have this other transaction in the, in the account that's here, but I haven't reconciled this. So here's where I corrected my uncategorized asset transaction, but it's not reconciled because remember, we had the 2 transactions in the account. So what I need to do here is I can either come over here and just force it and hit Save, and then I'll show you what happens when you do that. So now when I go to reconcile, this unreconciled account— Save for Later— is now okay again. So it's as simple as that, removing the duplicate and then re-reconciling the one side of the half that's, that's left behind. So you had 2 transactions in there, both of them were pointing towards Uncategorized Asset. One was showing the credit card payment side of it, receiving the payment, and then the other transaction was showing the bank account side of the transaction. They weren't together because they weren't linked bank account to credit card. When you pay the credit card, it goes from the bank account to the credit card account. That's the transfer that happens. A way to avoid this, highly recommend reconcile your credit card account, create the payment right there, and then go in and go plus sign. Checking and then just put the payment in from the bank side to the credit card account. It's entered. When it finally hits the bank, it's going to match and you're going to match both sides. You're going to match the credit card side, you're going to match the bank account side. Problem solved. No more uncategorized, no more uncategorized asset, no more dual 2 transactions that are really for the same, same exact event that happened. And you're good to go. So I hope that's helpful, and feel free to keep following me. Follow and subscribe to the, the YouTube page, and we'll see you next week. Bye now. Bye.
