How to avoid duplicate transactions in Quickbooks Online (QBO)

hello everyone welcome back to the Clara CFO group Channel a lot of you have found the channel because of some of our QuickBooks tutorial videos and one of the questions that I've been getting a lot and some of you have even signed up for QuickBooks because of these videos I wanted to support you guys with a question that I've been getting a lot and show you kind of how to avoid this thing a lot of times when people are doing their bookkeeping they somehow are creating duplicates duplicate entries and these duplicates are causing a lot of headache they're really annoying to go and fix and sometimes even knowing like how to fix them can be a problem so what this video is about is how to avoid making duplicates and also thinking about why we might be getting duplicates because what I've noticed with some of the clients that I'm working with especially when we have a duplicate problem a lot of it's the same issue recurring over and over again one in particular actually two in particular but then I've got another one as well that I'm seeing that could be another source of potential duplicate okay so if this is a headache for you I want to hopefully alleviate some of that headache and show you what you might be doing wrong and we can hopefully avoid it and fix it in the future but first before we get started if you aren't already subscribed to the channel we would love to have you here as a subscriber we would love to be able to continue delivering this type of information to you week in week out we usually do one video per week sometimes we have a little bonus video in there too so also make sure you have the little notification Bell clicked so that you know when we post a new video also keep us keep an eye out for us on the shorts section of YouTube because we've also got more content on the shorts and those are little bite size Finance tips for you all right well let's talk about um duplicates and how to avoid them we don't want to have duplicates what happens when we have a duplicate in our QuickBooks numbers is that we over report either income or expenses so if we have duplicate Revenue that we're going to over report our Revenue if we have duplicate expenses we're going to over report our expenses so there's literally just in a client meeting um two days ago or yesterday and what happened was the client had known that an IRS bill was coming in and had put it into the register where she was like I know this is coming so I'm going to go ahead and kind of assume that it's in there for like and she predated it which I wouldn't recommend um or she like future dated the expense and then when the expense actually came in it was just recorded as a normal expense so what happened is she had done this sort of manual entry and then the the transaction came in through the bank feed and it was added so we actually had two records in the register and I'll show you what I'm talking about when we talk about the register because that will be helpful when it goes to like actually cleaning up any duplicates but you know these things happen sometimes um I just high level one of the reasons these things do happen is QuickBooks Online is really smart but it's not end-all be all smart Okay so sometimes it's smart enough to get it halfway right and sometimes it's not smart enough to figure out anything so what we have to do is we always have to put on our human brain to make sure that whatever the system is doing for us that it's actually correct for example it might identify 500 came in and it might match that 500 to an outstanding invoice for five hundred dollars but it's not necessarily smart enough to know and the incoming information may not be smart enough to know that that 500 was actually related to that 500 invoice maybe you had another 500 invoice that you know it could have also maybe that was the one that was actually paid with that 500 you have to with QuickBooks you have to keep an eye on it because it is really really great and it will do a lot of great things for us but you have to also use your human brain and give it a little bit of a nudge sometimes or you know redirect we're like oh honey no like it's over here um that's how I feel like with quick quick books online sometimes it's like oh that was cute you tried but no that's not that's not the right thing um so we just have to babysit it okay so one of the I guess the three things that I'm going to talk about um one of the main ways that I see that we're getting mismatches between or we're getting duplicates is when a bill payment is recorded or an expense is recorded somehow and then um it's recorded as paid but then the transaction hits the bank and then gets added instead of those two things being matched up and that's matching principle is one of the biggest things that we're seeing the other way that I see this happening is if transfers are happening between accounts and you transfer something to One account but then instead of matching the transfer on the receiving end you transfer it on the other side so that you'll get duplicate transfers and then I'm also seeing sometimes on a sales receipt or an invoice you might have the sales receipt or the invoice marked as paid but then when that money actually comes in it could be this exact amount or maybe like a couple cents or a couple dollars have been taken out for like a transaction fee and so then that um the amounts don't show up as being paid and then you add it as a deposit and you showed it as an invoice that's been paid so those are kind of some of the examples I'm going to show you and the reason that these things happen is because we have the accounting record is the books that's what we want to be our source of Truth eventually um that that is our financial information that we want to rely on but we're trying to reconcile the books with the bank and when I say the bank generically but the bank means any Bank actual statements any investment statements any credit card statements any anything that's coming from these actual financial institutions that is holding your money because holding your money or like you know transacting your money like a credit card so we need to have the books and the bank know at least what the difference is between the two of them and that it's a legitimate difference a lot of times there's going to be a difference between the book and the bank when let's say you wrote a check to somebody in that check for ten thousand dollars was mailed now there's going to be a lag between the mailing and when that person receives it on the other side and when they actually go and cash it so the book is going to have potentially a transaction recorded before the bank will actually see that come through so there will be differences between the book and the bank sometimes okay so what we want is we want our transaction list or everything that's happening in the books which is QuickBooks like we're putting that into the books that those are able to line up with it actually happens in the bank at the end of the day so hopefully that's not too confusing but it will if you keep that Concept in mind I'm going to use it as I explain as we get into the screen share so let's go ahead and go into the banking screen here because I'm going to talk you through some of these um so thankfully they have some of this populated so I can show you exactly what could be happening so for example let's start with that first one that I was talking about where maybe an expense is paid or paid through bill pay but then it comes through on the bank feed so this stuff because I'm in the banking section all of these transactions are coming directly from the bank this is what the bank is saying is is truth on 220 books by Bessie because this is actually from the bank sometimes the description gets pre-populated with the wrong thing but books by Bessie 55 was received from books by Bessie okay so the bank that's coming in from Bank feed let's look at this expense down here for Hicks Hardware so Hicks Hardware it's saying that there was a 228 dollar expense and this is the bank detail it says Hicks Hardware but it's saying that this was paid now I want to go and see if this was through a bill payment so let's go down here to Hicks Hardware where we can see that 228 dollars was spent 228.75 was spent at Hicks Hardware um so in this situation the system is finding a match that's ideal ideally when you spend money you have something like a bill payment like if you if you did a bill pay um that is it's finding the match for you now some things you're not going to have necessarily A a book match to let's say you're you might be using the actual function over here of bills and you might be and see if it doesn't look like they are in this situation but if you actually had let's say you actually created a bill here let's just make this let's make a Hicks Hardware one and I'm gonna say it's foreign so let's do this people will use the bill pay feature in QuickBooks as they should um but sometimes they will have it going out of the wrong account or you know maybe they've they forgot that they went in here and let's go let's close this and we're going to say unpaid and then let's go over here this is the one I just made um let's go to let's look at the bill and then okay so let's go to Marcus paid if we paid it we've got to tell it how it was paid so let's say I actually put this on the credit card instead of the checking account if I don't do this the right way let's say I accidentally put this to the MasterCard okay and I said click save and close what it's going to do now is it's recorded a book transaction that I have paid that bill on the MasterCard so there's going to be a line and I'll show you guys this on the MasterCard it's not going to be here because that actually didn't come in through the bank feed but it is going to be over here in the register okay so you see this this is that thing that I just did this is how you get a duplicate so if I had changed that and done it out of the correct account it should have matched up and it all would have been fine but because I did not click the right account of where it was going what I actually paid the bill with um I'm going to get a duplicate because I've got a MasterCard transaction now of 228 and it's in my checking account for 228. so that happens all the time now another thing that can happen is maybe you have the bill and it's out of the correct account so let's just edit this let's say it was out of the correct checking account but um let's say the payment amount was slightly off so what's going to happen is it's the system again let's go into the checking account the system again is not smart enough to realize that 228.74 might be paying or this 228.75 might be paying that 228.74 bill because of an error so if you look now in my register if I go down to that date this is the check that was recorded but here's that payment that I just created falsely so 228.74 and here's 228.75 okay like this is going to be a mess so what I would need to do in this situation is go and change it back to 228.75 and then I could match it but so this one's already matched because they wrote a check out of the system so they're saying we wrote this check and then here it is it's actually cleared we're going to click find match or it already identified the match and so we're going to match that but that's those are a couple ways that that like you see how you've got to be paying attention to the detail that situation that I had with the client the IRS what she told was due versus what she actually paid there's a little bit of an interest difference so the system wasn't smart enough to recognize that the transaction she was paying was actually the transaction she had already recorded so we got a double payment um in to the IRS like that had been recorded because one was on the books and then one got added to the books from the bank feed so they made a duplicate so with that uh what we had to do is delete the duplicate so if you do find yourself in a situation where you have a duplicate and you know that it's a duplicate and it's not tied to any Bank transactions or anything like that you can simply go in here and click delete okay so what I deleted was a bill payment it actually just deleted the bill payment part of it but if I go back to expenses in this case if I go into my bills and I go to unpaid I I will see that hicks Hardware bill here still sitting as unpaid okay so if I just totally screwed that up all together we've paid the bill I don't want to have it in the system at all then I'm just gonna go ahead and delete this bill because it's been paid and I'm not going to mess with it okay so we don't want to have that potentially try to get paid again for example okay that's one way the expense mismatching now I'm going to see if I can do this on here and this transfer to savings so let's say I don't know if there's any transfers over here already in the system let's say this came in as a received amount into the savings account but I actually want to instead record it as a transfer from checking so if I want to record it from a transfer checking I can click but here's that transfer from savings so because I did it in the books I created a record in the books once I moved that transaction in the bank feed and I added it to the register it's now in the books and so I said that that 200 came from the checking account but the checking account is not telling me that 200 went there so that is that's a problem but what does happen sometimes is like if there was a 200 going out so anyways I'm not going to like force this into having um a false transaction here too but that will happen sometimes like if if one side sends the transaction the other side needs to match on a transfer sometimes what can happen is things people will just go at add instead of doing like an actual transfer so like if you're if you're moving money a lot between transactions you might sometimes get duplicates that way the last one I want to talk to you guys about is the income side so for example here is a income item a deposit that was recorded so this could happen sometimes if people go in and um see they have payment payments here and they're saying okay 868 dollars was deposited it's made up of these individual payments and um you know we're depositing it into the account that's all good that's fine bank deposit that's there's nothing wrong with that that's actually how it should be if there's not an invoice maybe there's a sales receipt for it um so that's ideal you want to match it up to what it is but some people might not be able to find those matches so they straight up go to categorize and then they just go directly to the income line item so let's say it was all design income and they go ahead and they add it here now we've created duplicates and I'm going to show you that so you can see that I have this transaction that was the deposit that was recorded because somebody got all the money and they were like okay this deposit is for these things and created a deposit record and then I disregarded that altogether and said nope I'm just going to record it all to income because it's income and I added the transaction rather than matching it to the record that was already created in the books this deposit record is what it should have been done but you can see now I've got two transactions for the exact same thing so how do I deal with this I'm going to actually just go ahead and delete this thing because I did it wrong I'm going to delete it and then see what it'll tell me what my options are when I go back to the bank feed so it's actually not here because I deleted it but if I go over to categorized I can see that this is one of those that I had added but I want to undo that so then now it'll be back here and again this is where now because I already told it I don't want to find a match I want to put it into a category um like it's trying to get me to categorize it but now it wants me to try to match it again to the actual transaction so hopefully there's a deposit here that I can actually match it up to so then you would just go here and click through the things that it actually matched up to so you can see how this becomes messy if you do it wrong the right way kind of unraveling it is kind of the annoying part about all of this so that's why I want you guys to be really clear before you make a mistake and put something in the wrong place try to avoid these duplicates and these are opportunities for duplicates okay so one of the things that can help you catch duplicates before it gets too far is to make sure that you're doing your bank reconciliations every single month so something anything that we just went through those duplicates would be sticking out like a sore thumb in a situation when we get to the bank reconciliations or a credit card reconciliation so make sure you're doing your bank reconciliations every single month and you'll catch these before it gets too bad but let me know if you're seeing duplicates in any other way I'm happy to go over those I know sometimes with PayPal people have the app like the PayPal app here and then they'll get a duplicate because they're actually like adding the transaction in PayPal and then also then adding it when if if like PayPal is a flow through to your credit card for example that will happen as well so you want to make sure that you're only recording one of those transactions and you can like have things flow through like a payroll PayPal holding account but I'm not going to get into PayPal on this one if you guys have questions about PayPal and we need to figure out how to handle that I will try to find a video for you guys but let me know if you're seeing duplicates in any other ways but hopefully this is helping you avoid duplicates in the future all right thank you guys and let me know if this was helpful please give it a big thumbs up if you made it to the end all right bye foreign [Music]

Channel: Clara CFO Group

Views: 45,069

Keywords: quickbooks online, quickbooks, bookkeeping, avoid duplicates in qbo, duplicate transactions qbo, qbo duplicates, duplicates in qbo, expenses twice in qbo, double counting expenses, double transactions in quickbooks, duplicate records qbo, duplicate invoices in quickbooks online, duplicate invoices in quickbooks, fix duplicates in qbo, qbo help, qbo clara cfo, clara cfo group quickbooks, clara cfo/qbo, clara cfo quickbooks

Id: 6tGb0-AzXEo

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023