Bank Accounts and Credit Cards

You’ve opened your mail, plucked out the customer payments, and deposited them in your bank account. In addition to that, you’ve paid your bills. Now you can sit back and relax knowing that most of the transactions in your bank and credit card accounts are accounted for. What’s left?

Some stray transactions might pop up—an insurance-claim check to deposit or handling the aftermath and bank fees for a customer’s bounced check, to name a couple. Plus, running a business typically means that money moves between accounts—from interest-bearing accounts to checking accounts,

from PayPal or merchant credit card accounts to your checking account, or from your regular checking account to a bank account specifically for payroll. For any financial transaction you perform, QuickBooks has a way to enter it, whether you prefer the guidance of transaction windows or the speed of an account-register window.

Reconciling your accounts to your bank statements is another key process you don’t want to skip. You and your bank can both make mistakes, and reconciling your accounts is the way to catch these discrepancies. Once the bane of bookkeepers everywhere, reconciling is practically automatic now that you can let QuickBooks handle the math.

In this chapter, the section on reconciling is the only must-read. And if you want to learn the fastest way to enter any type of bank account transaction, don’t skip the first section. You can read about transferring funds, loans, bounced checks, and other financial arcana covered in this chapter as the need arises.