Quickbooks: How to Stop Payment on a Lost Check
Need to stop payment on a lost check? Quickbooks makes this process a breeze. In just a few simple steps, you can easily stop payment and prevent it from affecting your books.
According to Intuit, the best way to stop payment on a lost check is to call the bank and notify them of the situation. Even though the check is lost, you still want anyone else finding it and attempting to cash or deposit it. Therefore, it’s best to call your bank and request a stop payment. Depending on your bank’s policies, they should oblige and cancel the check, giving you peace of mind knowing that it can’t be cashed.
However, there are a few other things you should know when stopping payment on a lost check. If it’s in the current period, you should go into your Quickbooks account, locate the check, and edit the total to $0.00. While optional, it’s also recommended that you add a note or memo, indicating the check was lost and cancelled. Intuit specifically recommends adding the stop payment and confirmation number to the note or memo, which you can obtain from your bank.
The above method should be used in most cases when a check is lost or otherwise inaccessible. If you sent the check to pay a bill, however, you’ll need to record it differently in your Quickbooks account. For checks used to pay bills, go back into your Quickbooks account and create a new journal entry as a deposit for the amount of the check. You’ll also need to create a clearing expense to use with this entry. Next, create a new check using the same clearing expense account on the expense tab. Assuming you performed the steps correctly, the two amounts should cancel in the clearing expense, thus resulting in the bill showing “paid” on the original pay date.
Losing a check is frustrating to say the least. Of course, you can avoid headaches such as this by choosing digital payment methods like direct deposit instead of using paper checks. And if you happen to lose a paper check, refer to the stops listed here to handle it. As long as you stop payment on the check and record it properly in Quickbooks, it won’t have a negative impact on your business’s books.
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