Matching transactions from the bank feed - avoiding double recording

One of the most common errors I see is where items in the bank feed are “added” to QuickBooks Online, when they have already been recorded.  This results in doubling up expenses, messing up the bank balance, and inaccurate sales tax reporting.

In this video I walk through the steps to look for a transaction that has not been automatically matched by the bank feed, and how to rectify it.

If you have duplicated entries that still need to be cleaned up – check out my course: Finding and Fixing Duplicated Transactions in QuickBooks Online

Video Transcript:

Hi, Kerry here from My Quick Book Keeping. One of the most common errors I see when I’m helping clients to clean up their books, is that they’re adding transactions that are coming from the bank feed instead of matching them to entries that have already been recorded in Quick Books. You can end up with transactions entered twice, your expenses are overstated ,your taxes are wrong, your bank won’t reconcile ,and if it’s a payment from a customer, you may not be able to tell if they’ve paid or not.

So, it’s really important that you understand how to do the matching from the bank feed. We’re going to walk through that today.

I’m in in the Canadian sample company, when you open up to dashboard you see your bank accounts here. Let’s have a look at the checking account; it says there are twelve transactions to review. So, we’ll click through here we can see the bank feed has brought in. These transactions, and we need to know either add them or match them, or do something with them to get them into our Quick Books. Just a note here, these items that show up for review are not actually in Quick Books yet, that’s something that I think is a little bit confusing. So, if you’re looking in the for review tab, none of these things have been entered from the bank feed.

Now, here’s where people often trip up; they see all of these things, they’re like, “Okay IT support center, I remember what this was” They’ll pop in, they’ll add it to their expenses. Let’s see where would this one likely go-professional fees- they’ll add it and off they go. Oh, better put in the tax code. Ontario, so we go with ‘yes’, we add it and it’s now in Quick Books.

So, if we look at the in Quick Books tab here, this item has been added and if we looked at our reports, this expense would be in here.

Now, that’s fine if we hadn’t already entered the expense. So, let’s go and check and see if it’s already been entered. Pop over to the expenses tab here on the left, I will choose suppliers and we’ll look for this IT guy. Here it is-IT support center. Now, if we have a look, we already have a transaction in here for hundred dollars and one cent. So, that would explain why it wasn’t matched on our bank feed and now it looks like we’ve recorded this twice. Here we are in the profit and loss, let’s scroll down and have a look under professional fees. One hundred and seventy seven dollars in here, we’ll open it up and here we have the two amounts; one of them that we’d already entered and one we edit from the bank feed.

So, we’ve doubled up on our expenses. So, going to pop back here now, you go back to the bank feed and go to in Quick Books. I’m going to undo this ‘add’ that we did, because we don’t want to add that, we know we’ve already got it. So, we have it here and we’re going to-where is it? Here it is. Oh, look at this, you know what to do with it now, but once you have it done, add it.

So, let’s have a look and we’re going to say find match and it hasn’t come up with the match, this is because the amount is different. So, we’re going to close out of this and pop back to that original transaction that we must have entered. So, if we go to expenses, back into the IT support company here, we have our 101. Now, what’s most likely happened is, when it’s calculated the tax-that HST, it’s gone and made it different by one cent. So, I’m going to change this now to eleven-fifty, save and close, pop back to our bank feed and see if it’s been able to match. Look at that, one record found and we can match.

So, now we match it, we’ll go back to our profit-loss again. Let’s just rerun that, all dates in here. We have professional fees at eighty eight-fifteen, we’ve only included it once. Now, when we then, of course, go to do our bank reconciliation, it will work too, because we have the expense in once not twice and our income statement is also correct.

Does that make sense? Hopefully that does, if not, reach out let me know. And just be super careful when you’re working with this bank feed, because if you add things that are already in, you’re going to end up doubled up. Perhaps another day, I’ll walk you through these deposits and matching them to customer payments. If that’s something that’s of interest to you, do let me know.

If you’re in this situation and would like some help to get it sorted out, reach out. You can book a consultation with me, there’s a link to my website below. I can help you out from anywhere with all of these wonderful remote tools we have.

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I’ve created a small business month-end checklist, now if you’re following through this and doing your reconciliation at the end of every month you probably wouldn’t have this situation. I hope you’re not in, but if you watch this video, you probably are. So, download that below. You can subscribed to my newsletter as well, which will let you know if there’s anything else that could help you.

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Cheers!