Balances Do Not Agree Between QBO and Your Bank

Balances Do Not Agree?

If your balances do not agree between QuickBooks Balance and Bank Balance columns in QuickBooks Online, don’t worry! There are several reasons that the balance in QuickBooks Online (QBO) will vary from the bank balance (and they may never match exactly).

Timing and outstanding checks:

The relationship between QBO and your bank is a real-time picture. What this means is that your bank balance and the balance in QBO will only match if you don’t have any outstanding checks.
You can think of the QBO balance as the balance that would be in your checkbook register. When you write a check from your checkbook, you deduct it from your register balance even though it hasn’t actually cleared the bank yet. This process causes your register balance to be different from your actual bank balance.
For example, if your bank balance is $1000 but you have an outstanding check for $50, QBO will enter the check in the register causing it to look as though it has already cleared the bank and will reduce your balance by $50, leaving you with a balance in QBO of $950. The bank balance, however, will continue to read $1000 until the outstanding check has cleared.

Downloaded Transactions:

Make sure you review your Downloaded Transactions that have not been accepted yet.
These transactions to review will not have been included in the register balance and can also cause a discrepancy between the balance in QBO and your bank balance.
Accepting them into the register will update the balance in QBO.
As long as they remain in the Downloaded Transactions screen they will not affect your QBO balance.

Duplicate transactions:

Transactions can be incorrectly added to the register instead of being matched to a current transaction already there.
An easy way to check for duplicates is to customize your register and sort it by amount instead of date.
This will place transactions of the same amount next to each other and make finding any possible duplicates much easier.