In this tutorial, Linda Artesani explains why duplicate credit‑card payment entries often appear in QuickBooks Online (QBO) when using the bank‑feed feature. The duplication occurs because QBO’s machine‑learning categorizes the payment as an "Uncategorized Asset" on the credit‑card side, then the same payment is also recorded on the bank side, leaving one entry uncategorized and the other reconciled. Linda demonstrates how to locate these duplicates using sorting and advanced search, how to delete the erroneous uncategorized entry, and how to re‑reconcile the correct transaction so the account balances line up. She also outlines best‑practice steps to prevent the issue: never use Uncategorized Asset/Expense/Income accounts, always record the payment from the bank side (e.g., Bank of America → Chase) and match it on the credit‑card side, and reconcile regularly rather than waiting until year‑end. The video walks through a sample QBO file, showing the problem, the fix, and the preventive workflow.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Ardisani, Ardisani Bookkeeping. So today's topic is one that is born out of what I see in a lot of client files, actually. And I am running into a lot of people who have duplicate credit card payments. So they're showing as in there twice. And of course, one side, one gets reconciled, the other one kind of hangs and it just hangs and hangs and hangs. And after about 6 months, you've got all these uncleared transactions. And when you look in the file at what they are, Well, that's the credit card payment. So I think part of it comes from the way QuickBooks is designed and the bank feed feature is designed and how the artificial learning recognizes a transaction. So let's go to my sample file. So here I've hooked up my bank account and my credit card, and it's the first time I've hooked it up and it's coming in as exactly what the learning has figured out. So QuickBooks has kind of a machine learning, it learns as you go along. And this is the first time I've hooked it up, so it's figuring out that the bank— the credit card payments are transferred from an uncategorized asset. So you probably don't even know what the heck that is, because why do we even have an uncategorized asset? So that's what it thinks it is. So I'm just going to come over here and, you know, I'm going to put that one in here. I'm just going to stick this one in here and add it. I'm just going to transfer it. Okay. So it's going to put an uncategorized asset on your books. And I— and it's going to do it again. And I'll put it in here and I'll put it in here and I'll just add the 2 of these here. It won't let me do them at the same time, so let me just do them one at a time. Yes, sometimes this happens to ProAdvisors too. We get these red warning screens. Anyway, it's been happening actually way too much. I actually saw a thread on Facebook about that happening to everybody. So, and then here's Intuit. So this is what I paid for my subscription, but I don't really know where it goes. I'm going to stick it there. That's what the thing says to put it. That's where I'm going to put it. So the problem you're going to run into is now I'm going to go over to the bank account. So it's tomorrow, pretend, and then these things are hitting, now hitting my bank. So they've now cleared the bank. The credit card's been processed. The payment's been processed on the Chase side, and now it's hitting my bank. So let me Find those payments, and here's the Chase. And it actually sees it's Chase because I've already told it to have a Chase credit card. I've already entered that as a vendor, and it wants to transfer it to the Chase credit card. Well, that makes sense, right? So I'm in the bank side. So the bank account, Bank of America, is paying the Chase credit card. Perfect. So I'm just going to come in here and put all these in. So I'm going to do this really quick since it recognized them. I'm going to click this top button, hold the Shift key down, and I'm going to blow through this list really quickly. Since those are all credit card payments, I'm going to accept them all. Now I'm going to reconcile it, and this is a feature— this is something that a lot of people do not do in their actual bookkeeping world. They don't reconcile. So they don't do it until the end of the year, and maybe the CPA says to you, hey, let me have your books. Invite me as the accountant user. And did you reconcile everything? And you're like, well, I don't need to. I've got the bank feeds bringing the transactions in. They match, so I'm good, right? Well, not necessarily. So you go into reconcile. So let's go in and we'll just reconcile this Chase card. And we'll come over here and I'm just going to go to the register and I'm going to go reconcile. It's an easy way to get to it. To reconcile this account. So I know that the green, little green C means it's in good shape, so I'm just going to put a 0 here because I don't have an amount, and I'll just do 3/31/18. I'm going to get rid of that. So I'm going to hit Start Reconciling. So I'm going to show you what happened when I put them in as an uncategorized asset. It took one half of the transaction and matched it, and then it took the other half and put it in an account called Uncategorized. Uncategorized asset. So as you can see here in my file, I have some duplicate payments in here. So let's just go here and sort by the payment amount, and then let's sort by the deposit amount. So you can see that the automatic payment thank you went through here, and yes, I want to check it off. So I see that all my categories or all my green boxes are here, so I want to just check off all my green boxes because that's going through the bank feed. Anything with a little green box here is a bank feed transaction, so I know those are all good. I'm not going to bother with these other ones because they didn't happen, right? So, and it's even got your little cleared date here, so I know that these are good. So I'm just going to hit save for later for now because it's not a true reconciliation. But what's going to happen when you do go back into reconcile? If I clicked to reconcile these, I'm going to have these other ones hanging. So let's just put in here, my cleared balance is $114.99, so I'm just going to go in here and put $114.99. So I'm going to clear off all the things that came into the bank feed and say it all matched because it would match, right? It's all from the bank feed, it's all matched. I'm going to hit Finish now. The next month I'm going to go in here to reconcile again and we'll just put 0 and I'll just put 4/30. And you're going to see that there's these old things hanging that didn't clear. Wait a minute, these are my bank payments, why didn't they clear? So they didn't clear because they didn't match because you entered the credit card side and then the payment side before it hit the bank and you put the credit card transaction in that uncategorized account. So these are going to hang even though these are the correct way to put them in because as you will see here as I look in here, it's I transferred money from Bank of America to pay the Chase card. That's the correct transaction. So if I come over here, let's just pick an amount. Let's pick the $11.65. Let's see if it's in here twice. So this is a good way to kind of investigate if it's here twice. So I'm just— I took the search button here and I clicked advanced search and that brought me to this screen and I did it, filtered it by all transactions amount equals $11.65. So let's see what happens. And this is always my first indicator that it's in here twice. So this actually was something that happened more than once, but the date range. So you can see here is where it happened in my credit card where that payment hit the bank. And if I open this up, I want to see that I did it from the uncategorized asset and it really came from Bank of America. Bank of America paid Chase, basically simple, end of story. This is what it should say. But if I change this, I've already reconciled the other account, so if I change this, it's going to be in here twice, right? So I don't want this transaction in here twice. I only want it in here once. So I want to delete this. So I'm going to come down here and delete this, and it's going to warn me that you reconciled this, are you sure you want to delete it? I'm going to say yes. Okay. Because what I want to do now is reconcile that transaction that was wrong. How do I do that? I'm going to come here and it's going to tell me when I go to reconcile this that hold off now, your account is off by $1,165. See, I deleted that transaction to Uncategorized Asset, but I want to reconcile That $1,165 that hit the Bank of America side. I don't want the uncategorized asset. So I can come over here to start before I get into this screen, and I'll just show you. I'm just going to open a link in a new tab. That because I entered it from the bank side correctly, it should see this transaction, and it's seeing it. It was on 3/21, and it actually— the transfer happened at my bank side. $322. Great. Is that going to fix my problem? Well, let's go look. Let me go back to this register. Let me just refresh the screen. And it didn't fix it. How can I fix it? I can come in here, help you fix it. Well, I deleted it, so I can't do that little trick that I showed you before because it's deleted. I took away the one to Uncategorized Asset because I had it in here twice. So how can I fix this without having to undo everything, right? I don't want to undo everything. How do I fix it? So I'm going to come to the register and look for this transaction. I know it's on 3/22, so I'm going to go back to that bank register and I'm going to— let me just refresh this. I'm going to look for it because now I know I matched it to the green match, right? And it was up here, and here it is, $1,165. So this is the one that I entered properly on the bank side to the proper accounts. It was Bank of America to Chase. It wasn't the Uncategorized Asset one because I deleted it. How can I fix that? You can click here and then save. Hit yes. Now I've re-reconciled the correct transaction. Because I had already reconciled this account, it threw off that beginning balance when I deleted the one that was to Uncategorized Asset. I need to re-reconcile the one that was accurate that I entered from the bank side. So I'm going to come back to reconcile here, and as you will see— we'll save for later— you'll see now that beginning balance is correct. I re-reconciled that one replacement transaction. That's all the steps you need to do. I know I went through that kind of fast, but just remember to avoid this entirely when you go to this banking screen. A, don't ever put anything to Uncategorized Assets. So at all costs, don't transfer to Uncategorized Assets. Don't transfer to Uncategorized Expense. Don't transfer or enter anything to Uncategorized Income. Those accounts don't mean anything. Always remember, to avoid this circumstance completely, when you pay a credit card, it'll come up in the Chase side first because I'm paying it on Chase's website. It'll clear Chase first. The payment will arrive. The bank feed will populate the transaction. If I did it today on April 7th, it's gonna populate it on April 7th or maybe April 8th because it's gonna trip. Push out from the bank feed. It won't show up in Bank of America until April 9th. I wanted to see— I want to enter it from April 9th transaction. I don't want to enter it from Chase. I want to enter it from Bank of America side, code it to the right transaction, match it in Chase. And if you do it the other way around and you see it, you'd enter it from Chase. You want to make sure you don't have Uncategorized Asset. You enter it from Chase— from Bank of America to Chase as the payment, transfer the money, Bank of America transfers to Chase, and then match it on Bank of America side. Don't enter it twice. That's how you avoid the circumstance there. I hope that's helpful. You may have to rewind this one to go through the steps again to fix your issue. And of course, if you need help fixing it, you can always call me because I'm getting to be a crackerjack at it. Again, this is Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. Thank you for watching. Bye now.
