Quickbooks Bookkeeping

QuickBooks Online — day-to-day bookkeeping

The operational layer: clearing the feed, keeping rules sane, and catching the transactions the feed never delivered.

1. Categorised is not reconciled

The single most costly misunderstanding in QBO. Three different states, and only the third proves anything:

An empty For Review queue means nothing. It says every transaction the feed delivered was dealt with. It says nothing about transactions the feed never delivered — which is exactly the PayPal failure mode in §4.

Only the Reconcile tool, run against the statement's closing balance, proves completeness. If you never run it, a missing transaction is invisible forever.

2. Match vs Add vs Exclude vs Transfer

Add-when-you-should-Match is the commonest way duplicates enter QBO, and it is why the aged debtors list stops agreeing the debtors control: the invoice stays open while a duplicate income line sits alongside it.

Exclude is not a bin. Use it for a genuine double-feed line, not for anything you cannot be bothered to classify. An excluded real transaction is a hole in the accounts that no reconciliation will find, because QBO no longer considers it.

3. Bank rules — and why they collide

Rules auto-categorise incoming feed lines. They are a large time saving and a large silent-error source.

How they go wrong:

• Overlap. Two rules match the same transaction; the one that wins is decided by rule order, not by which is more specific. A broad rule sitting above a narrow one silently swallows it.
• Over-broad conditions. A rule on contains "AMAZON" will catch AWS hosting, office consumables, and a personal purchase, and file all three identically.
• Auto-add. A rule set to add automatically posts without anyone looking. A wrong auto-add rule is wrong for every future transaction until someone notices.
• Silent drift. A supplier changes its bank narrative, the rule stops matching, and transactions quietly start landing uncategorised — or worse, get caught by a broader rule below it.

Discipline that holds:

1. Order narrowest first. Specific supplier rules above generic keyword rules.
2. Condition on more than one field — description and amount range, or description and bank account.
3. Do not auto-add anything with VAT consequences until the rule has been observed for a period. Auto-add is for the utility bill, not the mixed-use purchase.
4. Review the rule list quarterly and delete anything unused — an unused rule is either dead weight or is quietly shadowed by another.
5. When a rule changes, the past does not re-categorise. Fix the historical entries deliberately.

Split rules and mixed purchases: a rule cannot make a judgement. Anything needing a private-use apportionment or a capital/revenue decision must not be auto-added — see business-expenses-and-assets.

4. The feed gap — PayPal, Stripe, cards

This is the failure you actually hit. The feed connects, transactions flow, and then a subset silently never arrives — or arrives as a net figure instead of the underlying detail. Nothing in the For Review queue tells you something is missing, because a missing transaction has nothing to appear as.

Detect it — do not hover through both screens

Comparing statements to QBO line by line is the slow way to find it, and it is what people end up doing because nobody told them the fast checks:

1. Reconcile to the statement closing balance. This is the only check that catches a gap by arithmetic rather than by eye. A difference is the missing amount.
2. Count transactions per period — statement count vs QBO count for the same date range. A count mismatch localises the gap to a month in seconds.
3. Look for date-range holes. Feeds usually fail as a window, not as scattered singles. Sort by date and look for a suspiciously quiet stretch.
4. Reconcile the payment processor separately. PayPal is not a bank feed on your bank account — it is its own account with its own balance. If it is not being reconciled in its own right, gaps there are invisible from the bank side.
5. Feed one amount into ledger-error-diagnosis. The difference itself often names the class — equal to a real transaction, twice one, divisible by 9.

The partial-transaction problem

A processor payout arriving as a single net line, with the gross sale and the fees never posted, is not a missing transaction — it is a partially recorded one, and it is worse because the feed looks complete.

The payout is not the sale. One payout is many orders, minus fees, minus refunds, often across a period boundary. Post it through a clearing account: gross sales in, fees out, net payout out. Posting only the net understates turnover and costs, and for a VAT-registered company understates output VAT (bookkeeping-double-entry §5).

Repair

• Small number missing: add each from the source document, dated correctly.
• A window missing: import the provider's CSV for that range rather than keying it. Then check for duplicates at both edges — re-imports overlap.
• Feed broken at source: disconnect and relink the account, then expect an overlap and dedupe.
• Always re-run Reconcile afterwards. A repair you have not re-reconciled is a hypothesis (ledger-error-diagnosis §5).

5. Where QBO hides forced differences

Three accounts that fill up when someone makes a problem go away. Check all three before trusting any set of QBO figures.

A non-zero balance on any of these is a finding. Investigate it rather than presenting accounts drawn over the top of it. ledger-error-diagnosis §1 applies exactly: forcing the books to balance converts a visible error into an invisible one.

6. Replay — when a period that used to reconcile no longer does

QBO keeps an Audit Log: every create, edit and delete, with user, timestamp and before/after values. It answers the question no balance check can — what did someone change?

Reach for it first when a previously-clean period goes bad. A reconciled period does not un-reconcile on its own; something was edited, deleted, or had its date changed. The Audit Log names it, and it is the only route that finds a deletion, which by definition leaves nothing behind.

Watch for: a transaction's date edited into or out of the period · an amount changed after reconciliation · a deleted transaction that was part of a reconciled set · a changed opening balance.

For locating when a drift began rather than what was changed, bisect the periods rather than scanning them — ledger-error-diagnosis §2b and its bisect_periods.py.

7. A working rhythm

Weekly — clear For Review; anything you cannot classify stays in review with a note, never excluded and never guessed.

Monthly — reconcile every account to its statement, including PayPal, Stripe and cards as accounts in their own right; check the three §5 accounts; investigate any count mismatch.

Quarterly, before VAT — reconcile everything, prove the VAT control account (uk-vat §3), review the bank-rule list.

Annually — everything above, plus the year-end checklist in uk-statutory-accounts §4.

8. Anti-patterns

• Treating an empty For Review queue as a completed month. It only shows what arrived.
• Never running the Reconcile tool. Categorising is not reconciling, and only reconciling proves completeness.
• Add-when-you-should-Match, creating a duplicate and leaving the invoice open.
• Excluding transactions to tidy the queue.
• Forcing a reconciliation and letting the difference land in Reconciliation Discrepancy.
• Auto-add rules on anything needing judgement — private use, capital vs revenue, mixed VAT.
• Broad rules above narrow ones, silently shadowing them.
• Treating a processor payout as the sale.
• Not reconciling PayPal/Stripe as accounts in their own right.
• Leaving Undeposited Funds or Opening Balance Equity with a balance.
• Hunting a broken period by scanning forward instead of bisecting, or by eye instead of the Audit Log.