Sarah PrevostCo-Founder, The Proper Trust, The Accountants Law Lab, and Co-host of The Accountants Law Pod podcast

Deleting a payment on a credit card register deletes two transactions in QuickBooks Online.

3 Mar 2019 · 3 min

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3:01

In this QuickBooks Online tutorial, Linda Artesani answers a community question from Julie Waltmeyer about why deleting a payment in a credit‑card register removes both the charge and the payment. Linda shows that the issue occurs because the payment was originally recorded as a transfer from the MasterCard payable account to the same MasterCard account, making it a single transaction with two identical sides. Deleting it therefore erases both sides. She demonstrates how to change the payment account to a proper bank (general business) account, then re‑records the payment as a transfer from that bank account to the MasterCard payable account. This creates a true two‑sided transaction—one side in the bank register and the other in the credit‑card register—so deleting one side will not remove the other. Linda walks through the QuickBooks UI, filters to the relevant date, and shows the payment appearing correctly in both the bank and credit‑card registers. The video concludes with a reminder to use the bank account as the source when recording credit‑card payments to avoid the double‑deletion issue.

Chapters

Hi there, Linda Artesani. I thought I would answer another question from the community forum. So this one's from Julie Waltmeyer. How can I delete a payment on my credit card register? When I try, it deletes both the charge and the payment. So let's go to the actual— let me go to QuickBooks and we'll look here and you see this MasterCard payable. Where I've paid the— I've got a payment received and it's $117.26. If you look here, it's also on this side. So the problem is when you go to edit the transaction, you can see that it's a— the payment account is MasterCard as well as the— you're paying the MasterCard. So when you delete this transaction, it's going to delete both sides of the transaction. And I just approve this. I'm just going to change this to 1234 from EFT. Hit save. Go back to the actual transaction. 117 now says 1234, and you can see the other side of this says 1234. So you can see that the transaction is from the MasterCard account to the MasterCard account. So when you do that, it's the same transaction, right? It's MasterCard to MasterCard. Not going to work out. So if I go over here to delete this payment. If you watch here, you're going to see both sides are going to delete and they're both gone. No more 1234. So the proper way to show a payment— I'll just bring this one up to show you— you actually paid the payment from the bank account to the credit card account. So you want to show it from the general business account paying the MasterCard payable account, and that will solve your problem to make the transaction one-sided. So there's no 2 sides to this. You'll see that the payment is here and the other side. Well, there actually is 2 sides of this because if I just flip this chart of this bank account to the general account, you're going to see if we go down to where this date is because this has got a lot of postdated transactions in it. We get down to— this is a sample file, so it's got a lot of older dated things. I might have to go— let's just go here. I'll filter this to today's date. Let me just do this so you can see this side because the checking account clearly has a lot more transactions. Here it is. So you'll see it's on the bank account side. And then if I come over here to the credit card side and show the credit card register for the same date, you're going to see that transaction is here. So credit card side, bank account side, it's there. So it's two-sided, but it's two different banks. So that way you can, you can actually clearly see that. So when I deleted the two-sided, the transaction with both sides, it deleted both. So I hope that helps you and feel free to ask more questions if it doesn't quite make sense. But that's what you have to do to fix it. Thanks. Bye.