How to Enter Bank Transactions in QuickBooks Desktop

Quick Answer: In QuickBooks Desktop you enter a bank transaction by hand in one of five places: Banking > Write Checks for money out, Record Deposits / Make Deposits for money in, Banking > Enter Credit Card Charges for card purchases and refunds, Banking > Transfer Funds between your own accounts, or straight in the account register (double-click the account in the Chart of Accounts). Pick the form that matches the transaction type, fill in the account, payee, date, amount and expense or income account, then Save & Close.

Manually entering bank transactions in QuickBooks Desktop means recording each check, deposit, card charge or transfer yourself instead of downloading it. Desktop gives each transaction type its own form, and the account register accepts all of them in one grid. Handwork suits a few entries a month; past that, importing a bank file is faster and less error-prone.

Which window should you use for which transaction?

Intuit's own banking concepts article notes you can enter checks and deposits directly in a register instead of the Write Checks and Make Deposits windows, and that doing so is quicker and shows the full history of the account. The forms are better when you need items, classes, or a printed check.

How do you enter a check or payment in Write Checks?

Use this for paper checks, debit card swipes, online bill payments and bank fees: anything that takes money out of a bank account and is not a transfer.

1. Go to Banking > Write Checks.
2. In Bank Account, select the account the money left.
3. In No., enter the check number. For debit card or ACH payments, many bookkeepers type "DEBIT" or "ACH" so these never get confused with paper checks. Desktop assigns numbers according to your check-number preference, so overwrite it if it suggests the wrong one.
4. Enter the Date the payment was made.
5. In Pay to the Order of, choose the payee or add a new one.
6. On the Expenses tab, pick the expense account and amount. Split across several lines if one payment covers more than one cost, such as rent plus a late fee.
7. If you track inventory or service items, use the Items tab instead.
8. Clear Print Later if the check was handwritten or is not a paper check.
9. Select Save & Close, or Save & New to carry on.

Intuit's check writing article covers printing and editing checks after they are saved.

How do you record a deposit by hand?

Deposits depend on whether the money was already recorded as a customer payment.

• Customer payments already entered (Receive Payments or Sales Receipts) wait in Undeposited Funds. Open Record Deposits / Make Deposits from the Homepage, tick the payments that made up this bank deposit in the Payments to Deposit window, and select OK.
• Money that is not a customer payment (an owner contribution, a loan, a refund from a supplier, interest) goes on its own line in the Make Deposits window: choose the account it came from in From Account and enter the amount.

Then pick the bank in Deposit To, set the date to the day the bank credited it, add a memo, and Save & Close. If you kept some of the deposit as cash, Intuit's deposit article explains the Cash back goes to field.

The most common deposit mistake is entering the bank's total as a new deposit while the individual payments still sit in Undeposited Funds. Income is then counted twice, and Undeposited Funds grows month after month.

How do you enter credit card charges?

Card purchases do not touch your bank account until you pay the card, so they are entered against the card account.

1. Go to Banking > Enter Credit Card Charges.
2. Pick the card in the Credit Card dropdown.
3. Leave Purchase/Charge selected for a purchase, or choose Refund/Credit for a return.
4. Choose the vendor in Purchased From and set the date.
5. Add a memo if useful, then fill the Expenses or Items tab.
6. Save & Close.

When you pay the card from your bank, record that payment with Write Checks, choosing the card company as payee and the card's account on the Expenses tab. Do not code it to an expense; the charges already did that.

How do you use the register for fast entry?

For a run of simple entries, the register beats opening a form each time.

1. Open Lists > Chart of Accounts and double-click the bank account.
2. On the blank line at the bottom, enter the date, number, payee, and amount in Payment or Deposit.
3. Choose the account in the Account field. Click Splits if one line needs several accounts.
4. Press Record.

The register creates a check for amounts in the Payment column and a deposit for amounts in the Deposit column, so the result is the same as using the forms. What you lose is the Items tab, so switch to the full form for anything involving tracked items or a check you plan to print.

Transfers between your own accounts

Moving money from checking to savings, or from a business account to a payroll account, is not income or expense. Use Banking > Transfer Funds, choose the Transfer Funds From and Transfer Funds To accounts, enter the amount and date, and save. Entering a transfer as a check to yourself and a separate deposit is a frequent cause of inflated income and expense reports.

What mistakes should you watch for when entering by hand?

• Wrong date. Use the date the bank posted the transaction for anything you will reconcile; it makes the reconciliation screen line up with the statement.
• Wrong account. Entering a card purchase in Write Checks takes it out of the bank twice: once now, once when you pay the card.
• Transposed amounts. $1,540 typed as $1,450 is the classic reconciliation headache. Reconcile monthly to catch these while you still remember the transaction.
• Duplicate payees. "Amazon", "Amazon.com" and "AMZN Mktp" become three vendors. Pick from the list instead of typing.
• Entering what a download will bring in. If Bank Feeds is turned on for the account, a hand-entered transaction should be matched to the download, not added again.

When should you stop typing and import a file?

Manual entry stops making sense once you are retyping a statement. Signs it is time to switch:

1. You enter more than a few dozen bank lines a month.
2. You are catching up months or years of history.
3. You keep finding typing errors at reconciliation.

QuickBooks Desktop takes bank activity as a Web Connect (.QBO) file through File > Utilities > Import > Web Connect Files, after which you review each line in the Bank Feeds Center and add or match it. Most banks offer that download for recent months. For older months, or banks that only give you PDF statements, QuickBankConvert reads the statement and writes a .QBO you can import the same way. Either way, you still choose the payee and account during review, but nobody types an amount.

The QuickBooks Desktop import guide covers the Web Connect route in detail, and the QuickBooks integration page explains which of our formats each QuickBooks edition accepts.

Related guides

• How to reconcile in QuickBooks Desktop to check your entries against the statement.
• Import checks into QuickBooks for bringing in a batch of checks at once.
• Manually add a transaction in QuickBooks Online if you use the Online edition.