QuickBooks cleanup

What goes wrong in a QuickBooks file

QuickBooks rarely breaks loudly. It drifts. The file keeps opening, the reports keep generating, and the numbers quietly stop meaning anything. These are the usual culprits:

• Undeposited Funds that never clears. Payments recorded but never matched to the deposit that hit the bank, so income is counted twice and the balance grows all year.
• Opening Balance Equity with a balance in it. That account is meant to be temporary. Anything sitting there is a setup entry that was never properly assigned.
• A chart of accounts that grew by accident. Duplicate categories, accounts created on the fly during bank feed matching, and headings nobody can define any more.
• Duplicate transactions. Usually from a feed being connected twice, or a manual entry that was also imported.
• Reconciliations that were forced. A reconciliation closed out with an adjusting entry to make it balance, which hides the real discrepancy rather than finding it.
• Broken or re-authorised bank feeds. A feed drops, gets reconnected later, and leaves either a gap or an overlap in the transaction history.
• Uncategorised Expense doing heavy lifting. A catch-all account holding months of transactions nobody sorted.

The cleanup is done by a QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor, which matters here more than it does elsewhere: fixing a broken file means understanding how it is put together underneath, not just recategorising what is on the surface.

How the cleanup runs

The file gets reviewed before anything is changed, so you know what is actually wrong and what it will take. Then the work: the chart of accounts is rationalised, Undeposited Funds is cleared, Opening Balance Equity is resolved, duplicates are removed, feeds are re-linked with the gaps filled, and reconciliations are redone against real statements rather than forced to tie.

What comes back is a file that reconciles, a chart of accounts you can read, and reports that mean what they say.

Xero and other systems

The same problems exist in Xero under different names, and the cleanup is the same shape. QuickBooks gets its own page because it is what most Rhode Island small businesses are running, not because it is the only thing I will open.

Where to next