In this tutorial, Sarah Prevost from Art of Sunny Bookkeeping walks through common issues with the chart of accounts in QuickBooks Online (QBO) using a sample company, Linda's Law Firm. She demonstrates how to rearrange the order of bank and credit‑card accounts, identify duplicate bank accounts created by manual entry versus bank feeds, and merge them by renaming one account to exactly match the other while ensuring the account type (e.g., checking) is identical. She warns that merging will unreconcile the merged account and can flood the register with duplicate transactions, so she advises backing up the QBO file first—specifically recommending ChronoBooks (or similar services) to create a restore point. After merging, she shows how to quickly delete the now‑duplicate transactions directly from the register, highlighting the most efficient click‑path. The video emphasizes careful preparation, precise naming, and using backup tools to avoid data loss, and concludes with a brief sign‑off.
Chapters
Art of Sunny Bookkeeping. I thought I would do— stay on the same theme of the chart of accounts because I think that's an area that people sometimes struggle with a little bit, and I thought it would be a good idea to delve into a couple little things that I see come up for people time and again and just some helpful tips for working through the chart of accounts. So when I go into my sample company here, my Linda's Law Firm, And we'll start out with just this list. So there's quite a few credit cards and bank accounts here, and hopefully they're in the order that you want. But if they're not, you can click this little pencil and you can actually rearrange them. So you just move them. So say I want this bank account up underneath the Bank of America Interest Checking, I can just slide it up there and then hit Save. And now it'll stay in the order that I want. So when I come to the banking screen, Maybe this puts it in a more logical order if there were more accounts here. If they were all connected to online, it would show them in the order that I just put them in. So let's go over to the chart of accounts. I actually have that window open. And you'll see here that I have Bank of America account 7458 and Bank of America interest checking 7458. Oh, what happened there? Well, maybe I imported— looks like I connected the bank feed here. And I created a new account and didn't connect it to the current account. How can I fix this? Well, the simple fix is you can just rename this one, this one's name. Now, the problem is if you do that, that is going to merge the 2 accounts and unreconcile the one that you merge. So if I take this one, which is not connected, see how this one's connected to the bank? This one's not connected, so this might have been one I set up. I started manually entering, and then all of a sudden I decided to oh I can use my bank feeds, and I put this. I I connected it, but I made a new account. I can merge these, but don't rename this one. Well, we'll check and see. So if I come in and view the register, you can see this one's reconciled. So I don't want to rename this one the other one's name, even if that's the name I wanted to see. I can always change the name afterwards, but I don't want to do that. And then have everything merged. So I'm going to come in here. Now I'm going to have an issue if I rename this because it's going to— all these transactions are going to flood in and put the 2 together, and they're going to be sitting in there. And how am I going to get rid of them, right? So if I rename this one, let's see how many transactions. So there's only 1 page of 18. So I think I'm going to go for that. I'm going to just put them together because they don't belong They don't belong to be 2 accounts. And I'm going to rename this one the other one's name, and then I'll get rid of things really quickly. It's easy to delete from this page, so I'll show you. I'll come back to the chart of accounts, and I'll come back to Bank of America here. This is the one I want to keep. This is the reconciled one. It's also the one connected to the bank feed. I want to rename this one this one's name, so The easiest way to do this, because it has to be named perfectly to match to merge, is I'm just going to come in here and copy the name. I just hit right-click and copy the name of the one I want to keep, and then make sure that I have it be the same type. So it's important that it's the same type. So when I come into this one again, I'm going to just go in again one more time, and you'll see that the type is checking. So on the one that's a duplicate, the one I started here and I manually entered, let's just make sure it's the same. And it's checking. So I'm just going to rename it this name, and it's going to warn me it's already being used. We're going to merge the two. Do you want to? So here's a good tip: if you are unsure and you're unsure of the results and how it's going to come out, the best thing to do in this case is to get ChronoBooks and back up your QuickBooks Online file so that if you get a disastrous result and you lose all your bank reconciliation, you have to redo the whole thing, do that first. And then once you back up your file to ChronoBooks— and I'll put a link in the written post to how to get there— then once you've done that, then you can go back in time and go back to where you were before. It's just a safety net, but it's really important. And there's other online— I recommend ChronoBooks, but there's other ones out there that do the same thing, that can back up your QuickBooks Online file just like Desktop, and you can restore it back to where it was before you do this merge. So I'm going to hit Yes to merge it. There's no going back once you do that. And now I don't have the 2 bank accounts. Then of course I can come in here and I like the other name, so I can call Bank of America Interest Checking how it was. I had BOA— what is it— Bank of America Interest Checking, and I think I had little parentheses around it. So if I want to make it the same, I can just save and close it. Now it's named what the other one was named. So now we'll go back into the register here. This is the fastest way to get rid of if these were duplicates. So this is actually Actually wasn't two same counts, but you can see here that there's. I know I was reconciled up to 531, and I know there's 18 transactions in here that I want to get rid of. So the best thing to do is to go to your date prior to 531. Here's one. I know this doesn't belong there, so I'm just going to delete it because I'm reconciled to 531, and there was nothing left in the feed in the in the page. I reconciled. There was no leftover transactions, and then I'll just come down here and anything that doesn't have an R on it. This is stuff that came through on the other bank account. I'm just going to remove them, and it's really simple. Less clicks to get rid of things in this particular screen. This is the fastest way to delete anything is out of the register in QuickBooks Online, because if I tried to pull this up and delete this, I'll show you. If you were anywhere else in the system, you'd have to actually go edit the transaction, come down here to more, delete. It's like 4 clicks, but if you do it right from this screen, you just give one click to Open up the transaction, delete, and then I would just have to take out those 18 transactions that I know are duplicates because I've just merged my banking accounts together. Features in QuickBooks. I know I went over them very quickly, but I like to keep these blog posts short. Have a great rest of your day, and I hope you're having a wonderful summer. Bye now.
