In this tutorial, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping walks viewers through the process of reconciling a primary credit‑card account that has multiple employee sub‑cards in QuickBooks/QuickBooks Online. She explains how to set up a parent account (e.g., Chase) with subordinate sub‑accounts for each team member, then demonstrates how to identify why the balance sheet shows confusing negative and positive balances that don’t match the bank statement. By comparing the statement to the balance sheet, she uncovers that payments were applied to the wrong sub‑account, creating mismatched totals. She shows how to correct the issue using journal entries that move the erroneous amounts from the sub‑accounts back to the parent account, including handling class tracking for a property‑management business. The video also covers how to verify the fix on the balance sheet, how to inspect individual payments to see where they were applied, and offers practical advice on whether to break out payments each month or simply use a monthly journal‑entry cleanup. The tutorial ends with a call‑to‑action for viewers to request further QuickBooks help via Facebook.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I wanted to do a tutorial today about how you reconcile a credit card that has several subcards. So you may have one main account and your employees or your team each have their own credit card, but everything gets billed to one account. So the proper setup for that is to create a parent account for what the example is going to be today is Chase. And then the subaccounts are going to be underneath that, and you will enter the transactions into the subaccounts as they flow in with the credit card on the bank feed. So let's go to my account here. This is a pretty simple fix, but I just wanted to take you to it. So you might not even notice this is going on until you maybe come to the month end and go, I'm going to go through all my accounts, make sure everything is correct. And as you start to get into your accounts and reconcile and make sure things are right, you get down to your Chase account and it's minus $7,000, plus $5,000, plus $3,000, and the total of the credit card is $22,920.09. Well, why would that be? What are all these crazy balances? Well, first we'll go to the statement and make sure that $22,920.09— well, that part's correct. So from there, we'll go back to the balance sheet. And a quick way to make sure that the balance sheet is matching the actual bank statement balance as of the date of the statement is I can just come over here and collapse this by just clicking this arrow, and you can see it matches. So my account is set up properly. I've got my parent, which is Chase Southwest, and I've got my subcategories here. So we'll come into the chart of accounts, and here they are, and it looks even more Crazy balance here with negatives, and it's just, it's just kind of a mess. So that's as of today's date, so that's why it's not exactly matching. So we'll come over to the register, and I've got the tabs open already, but normally you just click register to come and open that up and just save time, not bore you from me scrolling down. And I can see that the balance on this card was reconciled on 5/3, and the $2,292.09 is correct. So how do I fix this? So this is probably a cumulative effect of somebody making entries and dropping all the transactions actually in the right places because it's connected to the bank feed. So they're going to flow in under the right subcategories, but the payment isn't being put in properly. So that's what causes this, you know, minus balance on a credit card means that you either overpaid your credit card or maybe you paid it in full and returned something. So that's the only reason why you'd have a minus account. But for $7,000, that's quite a bit of money. So it just needs to be cleaned up. So let's clean this up so that the total balance— that all you see is the parent account with that one total. So you would do that by journal entry. Put Sanders in. So Chase Sanders, and the amount was $3,923. And I'm just going to write over here to clean up Sub-account balances to parent account on credit card. Okay, and then here I'm gonna go to the other Chase account, which is the MCA one. That one's the one that has the weird balance, right? It's the one that's got the, the negative. So in order to clean this side up, it's the opposite. So I have to put that $7,275 on the other side. So we'll come over here and And it's $7,275.87. And that was created because somebody made payments and used that account instead of the parent account, which is not your typical. Normally the parent account is going to have that weird negative balance. And then I'll just do the Chase account and let it do the math for me. And that's the total. So I'm going to hit Save. Keep this open. Let's go check it out. Oh, it needs some classes. I forgot this account has classes. It's— this isn't that important. It's not going to be broken out by the buildings. This happens to be a property management company that my husband and I own. So we're just going to just put General and Admin. This isn't really anything that needs to be classified. The transactions are classified at the time that they're entered in from the credit card through the bank feed. So we're going to come back over here and back to the balance sheet. And because I have separate tabs open— let's find the credit card here— because I had separate tabs open, I want to come over here and you're going to see that this refreshed for me and the balance is now $2,292.09. These are all zero, so this is beautiful. This is what you want to see. And I can roll it back up. I can open it up, and now you don't have those crazy weird balances that shouldn't be in the account. So to find out what happened and why it's not wasn't right, and and then I can ask the person who does this account, why did you do it this way? Maybe they aren't aware that you should be breaking the payment out. We can come over here, and since I know that this account happened to have the biggest balance, we can come over here and see. That the payments— let's find a payment that she made. Just grab any of them. Let's go to edit and we'll see how she's applied the payment. And she's making the payment to the MCA card instead of making it to the parent account. So what you'd want to do here to make it correct is you'd want to go back to the statement and see how this amount is broken out by each team player, right? So each employee that has a card. So this happens to be— I think Kevin's card is first, so we go through that one first, and you'd have to total it up to break it out. So that's why sometimes it's just easier to go in here and just make a journal entry each month and just clear it out. Just put everything through the parent account and then just do the journal entry to kind of clean it up. Otherwise, since this— if you have a credit card statement that actually does the math for you, then, then that's great. You can do— you can just go by the totals, but most of them don't really have Those, they're not totaled. Like this one's not totaled, and most people use Chase, Bank of America, so you can see there's no totals. It doesn't give me total by card, I don't think, in here anywhere. So if it's not totaled by card, then you need to do the journal entry like that to make it correct. The correct way to enter the payment would be to break it out by the— if you wanted to do it exactly right every month, is you'd break it out by the totals on each card was charged, and then that would clear it out and the balance would be correct. in the correct subaccount. But most people don't spend a lot of time on this. It's kind of, where do you want to spend your time, right? In the long run, the balance is correct, and that's the most important piece. So that is my short tutorial on how to clean up credit card balances that may not exactly be looking correct on your balance sheet. If you have any other questions, comments, want to hear a blog or here, have me do a video blog for you doing some kind of work in QuickBooks, reach out to me on Facebook. I'll have that link in my post. Thank you for watching. Bye now.
