How to Unreconcile a Bank Statement in QuickBooks Online

Quick Answer: To unreconcile a single transaction in QuickBooks Online, open the account's history from the Chart of accounts, expand the transaction, and click its R box until it is blank, then save. To undo an entire past reconciliation, an accountant user (or the Primary Admin) goes to Reconcile > History by account and chooses Undo in the Action column, which also undoes every later reconciliation.

QuickBooks Online gives you two ways to correct a reconciliation you already finished. Anyone can change the status of individual transactions, one at a time, from the account's history. Undoing a whole statement period in one step is reserved for accountant roles and the company's Primary Admin. Which one you need depends on how much is wrong and how far back it goes.

If you are here because a reconciliation simply will not balance, you may not need to undo anything; start with why a bank reconciliation doesn't balance. This page is for periods that were finished and are now known to be wrong.

Which correction fits your problem?

How do you unreconcile one transaction?

Intuit's article on undoing or removing transactions from reconciliations lays out the steps:

1. Go to All apps > Accounting > Chart of accounts.
2. Find the bank or card account and select Account history.
3. Locate the transaction. Reconciled items show an R in the checkmark column.
4. Select the transaction to expand it.
5. Click the checkmark box. Each click moves it one step: R (reconciled), then C (cleared), then blank (uncleared).
6. Stop at the status you want and select Save, then Yes to confirm.

Blank is the right choice when the item belongs on a later statement, so it reappears on the next reconcile screen. C is occasionally useful if the bank has processed the item but you want it included in a specific future reconciliation.

Before you click, be sure this transaction really is the problem. Intuit's guidance is to confirm the item caused the discrepancy before removing it, because each change moves balances.

What happens to next month's beginning balance?

Removing a reconciled transaction changes the total of everything marked R, and that total is the next reconciliation's beginning balance. Unreconcile a $640 deposit from June and July's beginning balance drops by $640. The next time you open the Reconcile page, QuickBooks will warn that the beginning balance does not match the last ending balance.

That warning is expected, not a new error. It opens the Reconcile Discrepancy Report, which lists your own change along with who made it and when. When you then reconcile July and tick the $640 deposit there, the period balances again. If you unreconcile several items, write down each amount and date first; it makes the discrepancy report easy to read.

How does an accountant undo a whole reconciliation?

According to Intuit's page on undoing a client's reconciliation, the Undo option belongs to the company's Primary Admin, Accountant or In-House Accountant users with access to the company, and users in an Intuit Enterprise Suite firm. The steps:

1. Go to All apps > Accounting > Reconcile.
2. Select History by account.
3. Choose the account and a date range that includes the reconciliation.
4. Find the reconciliation in the list.
5. In the Action column dropdown, select Undo. A Primary Admin with an accountant attached is prompted to consult them and selects Continue to proceed.
6. Read the confirmation window, tick the acknowledgment box, and select Undo reconciliation.

Read this before you click Undo

• Attachments and reports are deleted. Download the reconciliation report and any statement attached to that session first. Intuit is explicit that undoing removes them permanently.
• Every later reconciliation is undone too. Undo January in May and February, March and April go with it. Intuit's advice is to start with the most recent reconciliation and work backward, so you see the effect one period at a time.
• Transaction statuses revert. Items return to cleared or uncleared, and beginning balances reset to match.

How do you fix a reconciliation finished with a difference?

When someone selects Finish now while a difference remains, QuickBooks records an adjusting journal entry for that amount so the account appears balanced. The adjustment carries an R, so it looks like any other reconciled line and quietly moves the balance.

To put it right:

1. Find the adjustment. Open the reconciliation report for that period and look for a journal entry you did not create; it is also in the account's history around the statement end date.
2. Download the report and any attached statement.
3. Have an accountant user undo the reconciliation (or, if you have no accountant role, unreconcile the adjustment by clicking its R box to blank).
4. Delete or void the adjusting journal entry.
5. Reconcile the period again from the statement, this time tracing the real cause of the gap.

Deleting a reconciled adjustment without undoing the period first will trigger a beginning-balance warning on the next reconciliation, because a reconciled amount disappeared. That is fine if you expect it and reconcile the period again straight away.

How do you find out who changed a reconciled item?

Sometimes the question is not how to undo a reconciliation but why it went wrong in the first place. Two tools answer that without changing anything.

• The audit log. Go to Settings > Audit log and filter by the account and the dates since the last good reconciliation. It shows edits, deletions and voids, including ones that no longer appear anywhere else because the transaction is gone.
• The register filtered by status. In the Chart of accounts, open the account's register and filter by reconcile status. Any transaction marked R but dated after your last completed reconciliation was set by hand, not by a reconciliation session, and is a likely culprit.

Checking these first often shows that one transaction needs unreconciling, not a whole month. That keeps the later periods, their reports and their attachments intact, which is far less work than an undo followed by several re-reconciliations.

Redoing the period after an undo

Once a reconciliation is undone, you need the bank statement again to re-tick it. If the original was attached in QuickBooks, download it before undoing. If not, download it from the bank. Comparing a long statement line by line is easier with the transactions in a spreadsheet: QuickBankConvert turns the PDF into Excel rows with dates, descriptions and signed amounts, and asks for the password if the bank protects its statements. Scanned paper statements are read less accurately than files downloaded from the bank, so check those totals against the printed page. The PDF to Excel page shows what the output looks like.

Then follow the normal steps in how to reconcile in QuickBooks Online, oldest undone period first, and attach the statement when you finish.

Related guides

• QuickBooks bank reconciliation report: where history lives and what each section means
• How to reconcile in QuickBooks Online
• Bank statement reconciliation guide