Beginning Balance off? Do you see that yellow warning, “Hold off. Your bank account is not ready to be balanced yet?”
How do you get the correct beginning balance? You think to yourself, “I don’t remember changing any cleared transactions? How can it be off?” And then you think, “How the the heck to I put it back?”
Ah, remember the good old days when you could just erase it like this picture? That’s how I learned accounting. The big old green ledger book and the columns and the adding. We have come a long way from that. And the future will be more automated! Yay for QuickBooks Online (QBO).
Beginning Balance: Find your difference
This part is easy as QBO has automated that with the little yellow warning as you go to enter the ending balance and reconcile.
Beginning Balance: Re-reconcile the changed/reinstated transaction
Did you know there is a hidden place that if you click there, it opens up a box to re-reconcile the offending transaction(s)? See the video for a demonstration.
How did this happen?
It can simply happen because you made a change to a transaction. Sometimes we automate things so much that we quickly accept what QuickBooks is telling you. For example, you can see a transaction that you downloaded and notice, “Well that is the wrong vendor…” and you open up the transaction and change the vendor. What happens next? A box will pop up asking if you want to overwrite the transaction with the most recent information from the last transaction. You say yes and “voila”, the amount is changed too. Whoops! But you may not even notice the warning telling you that the amount of the bank feed link doesn’t match your changed transaction. You click save and the damage is done.
Another scenario is that you change the category from one bank account to another. No change in amount, but it saves and becomes unreconciled.
Last piece of advice: Why is this hidden?
I hate that some things are hidden in QuickBooks online. See these other posts on hidden things. Also, I have a post on how to undo a bank reconciliation if you do not have the undo button of QuickBooks Online Accountant version.
If you have any questions or would like to see a future video on another topic, please reach out to me on Facebook.
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