QuickBooks Online won't let you record a negative deposit. Linda Ardesani shows how to work around it: create a clearing account, route the refund and deposit there, then record an expense to move the net negative amount to the bank. Match it to your feed and you're done.
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Hi there, Linda Ardesani, Ardesani Bookkeeping. I wanted to do a really short tutorial on how to record a deposit into QuickBooks where maybe you have a customer that paid you and then you also refund a customer and those 2 deposits in merchant services were combined and the money came out of your bank account and you need to record this deposit but QuickBooks Online won't let you record a negative deposit. So I'm going to show you a little workaround that works for this. And it's, you know, you can do it in QuickBooks Desktop if it's merchant services, but you can't do it with online unless you do follow these steps. So let's go into QuickBooks. So I've got my sample law firm company, and, you know, you receive the message, and usually there'll be like a little warning here. This is a sample company, and I'm going to make my bank deposit. And you can see I've got my refund and my deposit, so my deposit's going to be $956 negative. Both of these things happen on the same date today, so I'm going to hit Save, Save and Close. Something's not right. You must specify a transaction that is $0 or greater. So here's the problem, right? So I need to record this deposit. They're both in Undeposited Funds. How can I get this into my bank account? It's really— it's going to end up being a check, right? It's going to be an expense. Because you can't record this as a deposit because money was taken out of your account. You refunded a client $1,000 that maybe you were paid for earlier in the month, and now you refunded that person. And this can happen the same way as actually my client. His problem was bank fees for the month. He's got a bank account, merchant services account, that they take the money out every Every month. They just do one lump sum out of his account when he gets his transactions hit the bank during the month, and then once a month he gets his merchant fees. Usually I think it's coded as DES when you see it in the bank feed. So in his case, he had a deposit and then he had merchant fees from the prior period that were more, and he had the same scenario, right? He had a minus account. So how do we, how do we actually Do this. So I have to get out of here because obviously any red warning, and I have to admit some of these warnings, like it's it's somewhat makes sense. But I think this is where people get very frustrated with QuickBooks. You must specify a transaction that is zero or greater. How about saying you cannot record a negative deposit? That might be a little bit more clear than that message. But nevertheless, I want to leave without saving. So I need to put this in. A clearing account. The only way I can reflect that and get that deposit out and get that fee in, I can't have that all going through my bank account. So I'm going to make it go into a clearing account, which I've already created. And it is a— I'll show you. It is an other current asset, and it's just like the undeposited funds, and it will show up when it comes time for me to make this deposit. So I need to go into my sales receipt— sales refund, And I need to have that deposited not to undeposited funds, but I want it to go into my clearing account. So I'm going to basically flow these 2 transactions into this clearing account and then transfer that into my bank account. So when it comes into the bank account, it's going to actually show that account being credited, credited for— So when it hits the bank account, it's actually going to reflect in my bank account with the correct expense transaction, which is actually what happened in my bank level. I had money taken out in the net amount of this transaction being grouped together. So let's go to the other transaction, which is the deposit. Let's see if I can find that. I'll come over here, actually. Let's come over to payment. Here it is. And I'm going to come in here. I'm also going to have that go through my clearing account. Save and close. So we'll go back to that chart of accounts, go back to the clearing account. You can see the register because really what happened was $956 was taken out of my bank account. So how am I gonna get that $956 withdrawal out of this account and put into my regular bank account? So I'm just gonna make an expense transaction, right? So it's $956. I'm going to have it show that it comes from, and I don't even need to put a payee here. So the next step here is to take the clearing account and zero it out and make the money come out of my bank account. So I'm just going to show that this money is coming out of my bank account. I'm going to use the clearing account here in the transaction, $956, same date. So you got to make sure all the dates are proper. Save and close. We're going to go back to my clearing account. Now it's zero. We'll go back to my bank account, my Bank of America. I think it's this one. We'll go to this register here. I've got a couple bank records here, and then there's that transaction showing out of the clearing account. So now I'm showing that, and then when the transaction actually clears through the bank and it comes in the bank feed, I can now match that, and I have no more transactions in my bank deposit window that were hanging from merchant services. So that's the short version of how to get this out. It's pretty simple and straightforward, but I just wanted to demo that because it does come up, and as it did with my customer, it's there and he has the same issue. So he's got to do that with a couple of transactions. But at least we have a way to do it. And there's always a workaround, right? So thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate that the blog is— the videos and the blog are really helpful to people. If you have any suggestions for a video or something that's just kind of stumping you and you'd like one, please reach out to me on Facebook. It'll be a link to this video and link to my blog site so that you can reach out to me anytime with any QuickBooks issues. Thanks for watching. Bye now. Bye.
