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If you use Quickbooks to keep track of your business’s financial transactions, you might be wondering how the accounting software handles matched banking transactions. When you download transactions, you can access the “For Review” menu to see and review the transactions. However, you also have the option to match those transactions with the transactions listed in your company file. So, how exactly does Quickbooks handle these matched transactions?

Assuming you use Quickbooks Online and not the desktop version of Intuit’s popular accounting software, Quickbooks will try and match the transactions within 90 days of the specified transaction date. This is done to allow ample time for checks to clear. A customer may pay you on Monday, for example, but his or her check might not clear your bank for another one or two weeks. To overcome this challenge, Quickbooks Online will automatically search for all matching transactions within 90 days of the specified date. If a transaction is older than 180 days, it will not match it.

When Quickbooks Online attempts to match your bank deposit and credit transactions, it will search for several different things, including payments for the respective invoice, sales receipts, journal entries, unpaid customer invoices and deposits that you’ve made. When attempting to match checks, expenses and debits, Quickbooks will search for payments made to vendors, expenses for vendors, debits listed in your bank or credit card account and journal entries with debit transactions.

So, how do you assign categories to these transactions? To do this, log in to your Quickbooks account and select the “Banking” menu at the top of the screen. From here, click an open area in the transaction row so that Quickbooks provides you with more information about it. You can then assign a payee to the transaction. If Quickbooks finds a matching customer or vendor, it will automatically display the customer’s or vendor’s name. If it doesn’t find one, you can add one by clicking the “+Add new” drop-down menu and selecting the appropriate customer or vendor.

In the event that you don’t add a customer or vendor to the transaction, Quickbooks won’t include a name in the transaction when it adds it to the register. Finally, choose a category for the transaction under the “Category” drop-down menu. By default, many transactions use the “Uncategorized Income” category, which is too general for proper accounting. So, choose a more specific category for the transaction.

Did this tutorial work for you? Let us know in the comments section below!