 QuickBooks Online 2022. Delete general lecture account or make inactive. Get ready because it's go time with QuickBooks Online 2022. Here we are in our bank feed practice file. We set up with a 30-day free trial, holding down control, scroll it up a bit to get to the one, two, five percent we're currently in the homepage. Otherwise, no one is the get things done page. In the business view as compared to the accounting view, if you want a change to the accounting view with something you can do by going to the cog up top, switch to accounting view down below, we will be switching between the two views either here or by jumping over to the sample company file currently in the accounting view. Back on over to the bank feed practice file, we're gonna be taking a look at the chart of accounts which has been set up automatically for us as we created the new file. We'd like to in essence clear out the chart of accounts as much as possible, this time imagining that we would like to basically customize our chart of accounts. So to do that, let's go into the bookkeeping tab. This is where the accounts are going to be located and then we're in the chart of accounts up top and then in the chart of accounts on the right hand side. Now, whenever I'm like deleting or adding accounts at this point in time, I don't like as much the way the business view is doing it as the accounting view. There are some differences with basically the functionality of adding and removing accounts and that's something I hope that they change on the business view because everything else on the business view I think works well, it's just formatted or located in a different area. So for this, I'm actually gonna switch to the accounting view by going to the cog up top and then switch to the accounting view when I'm working within the general ledger. So now on the accounting view, we're in the accounting tab on the left hand side and then the chart of accounts is in the tab up top. So this is the chart of accounts that's just set up whenever we set up a new QuickBooks file and as you set up a new QuickBooks file, I keep on thinking that they're gonna make a different chart of accounts for basically different types of industries and all the different kind of data input that we put into the system such as the type of company as a sole proprietorship, partnership, C corporation, S corporation, or is it a different industry? Does it sell inventory, wholesale, read sale? Is it in bookkeeping or so on? But they doesn't look like they are, they're just having this large chart of accounts that are trying to make a catchall type of chart of accounts that can suit everybody's needs. So that means on a general level, what I would basically recommend is if you don't have experience with making the bookkeeping intensely and making the chart of accounts, you might then want to use the account if they have it. In other words, as you're doing data input, the practice would be you do the data input, if the account is there that you need to use, that you want to use, then you use the account that they are given in the chart of accounts. And then if the account is not there, but there's a similar account, which you don't like the name exactly, and possibly you don't like that possibly they made it as a sub account or something like that, then possibly I would still use that account and then go back into the chart of account and adjust it, edit it, simply changing the name, possibly making it a non sub account so that you're not adding two accounts of a similar type, which can confuse the data input because these are the types of accounts that are going to be dropping down whenever you do the data input on an invoice or something like that, and whenever you assign an account to a bank feed transaction. So you don't want to get confused so that you're assigning the same type of thing to do two accounts that sound similar and that can happen if you just create accounts every time you enter a new transaction and then you have way too many accounts and some of those accounts sound the same as you do the data input, especially if you're going to go from one person doing the data input to another and there can be some confusion with the data input in that case. So you'd kind of like to trim down the accounts and then if there's no account of any kind that is named what you want it to be, only then add the new account. Then after you've gone through a couple months of adding transactions, you might want to go back in here and make inactive or attempt to delete the accounts that you're not using so that you can trim down the chart of accounts to the accounts that you are using, making it a little bit easier to manage as you're doing the data input, as you're running reports and making budgets and things like that. That's the general format I would recommend or if you're comfortable making your accounts, then and you want a chart of accounts that's custom directly to what you are doing in your accounting system or possibly you have types of income accounts and expense accounts that are non-typical or you want to have a more customized name of them, we try to just clear out the chart of accounts here and make our chart of accounts as we enter the data, in this case entering the data directly from the bank feeds is what we will practice here. That's what we would like to do here. So what I wanna do then is make these accounts inactive. I'd like to delete them but the QuickBooks system will not let us delete them, it'll just make them inactive. Now, so we'll have to deal with that, we'll make them inactive and then we'll basically build our own in essence chart of accounts. Now when you're making something inactive, if you already had deep information in the account, you need to be careful because when you make the account inactive, then it's gonna be an inactive account. I believe it'll still show on your bank statement as on your reports, I mean, if there's activity in it and it actually shows the balance, it'll still create the balance so your balance sheet isn't out of balance and it'll show the account as a deleted account, it'll give you a reference to that account has been deleted. But be careful of course, if there's data in the account to make it inactive, but I believe you could still basically do it and if there's an impact on the financial statements, it'll show it as deleted. So in any case, so we can go into each of these accounts, we can go into them and say I'm gonna right click on it, I'm not right clicking, I'm gonna click the dropdown and there's no delete button, I can't delete it, but I can make it inactive and it won't reduce the usage of the account, meaning I believe that's intended to mean that it's not gonna basically delete the transactions you already recorded to it in the past, you can make it inactive from this point going forward. It's gonna say are you sure you wanna make it inactive? I'm gonna say yes, and then it makes that inactive. Now, if you wanted to find that account, it no longer shows up in the chart of accounts to look at it this way, but if I hit the cog dropdown up top and I said I wanna see my inactive accounts, for example, and possibly not all the other accounts, just the inactive ones, then it should show my inactive account. So here's the inactive account up top, let's hit that cog dropdown again. So I just want the inactive account, inactive account, so here it is, well it shows that one as deleted, so that's gonna be the deleted account here and then of course we can make it active, bringing it back in to active if we so choose, clicking this item, pulling it back into the active status. So I'm gonna go back in here, this one, I'm gonna, this up top are actually showing the columns, so I'm gonna show the columns that are applied here. Okay, so now I'm gonna try to make all of them inactive so I could select the entire thing and try to do a batch action and I'm gonna make the entire thing inactive. I'm gonna choose the entire thing, make it inactive. So we can't make some accounts inactive and I'm gonna say, okay, I got it, make accounts inactive, you're about to make 133 accounts inactive, sub accounts of one or more selected accounts will be made inactive too, this will remove them from the account and category fields on your transactions, you can make them active again later if you need to. I'm gonna say yes, make them inactive and so it says it failed to inactivate some accounts unable to make six accounts inactive. So I'm gonna say, okay, that's fine. So we've got the payment, that's gonna be the clearing account that used to be called undeposited funds. So it says I'm not gonna do that because it has a special need and the reason it can't make that inactive, I believe from just a software standpoint is that that one ties into the bank feeds, tie into those amounts that are gonna go into what used to be called undeposited funds from the receive payment account here and the sales receipt. So that's the one that allows you to kind of reconcile or tie together multiple deposits into one grouping. So it used to be called undeposited funds, it's now called payments to deposit here. They got the uncategorized assets, which is like a catch all account if you enter something and something's out of balance, same with the opening balance equity pot often being used. If you try to enter something like an opening balance into the system, then QuickBooks will automatically post it over here. And if you were to delete the account, QuickBooks wouldn't know what to do and it would make things that are out of balance. So it needs to keep that account in place. The retained earnings is the account that the income accounts are gonna roll into meaning income and expense accounts, the profit and loss accounts, that's your closing process. So the fact that it's linked to the closing process means that you have to have it or else the software wouldn't work properly. They are forcing you to keep this one income account, the services account and then these uncategorized income and expense accounts are also accounts that QuickBooks can use from time to time when you're entering beginning balances or some type of transaction where you're only entering one side of the transaction possibly something like entering an accounts receivable balance for a customer and the system then is gonna create the other side going somewhere possibly to uncategorized income and expenses to make sure that we're still in balance. So that's fine. We've got a basic kind of number of accounts here. And if I wanted to make them active again, of course I can hit the dropdown and make them active. If I wanna see all the inactive accounts I can go to see all of the inactive accounts here. So now we've got all these accounts that are inactive if I go back up top, I can say, okay, I don't wanna see the inactive accounts. And then I'm gonna go to the hamburger up top and just check out what if I was to enter something like a check or a bill. Let's go to a bill up top and just take a look at the dropdown with regards to the chart of accounts down below. If I go into the chart of accounts and hit the dropdown, select a category. So I'm gonna say next, close this out. They're trying to give me the walkthrough. So I've got the income accounts and notice that those accounts are not showing in the dropdown. That's what I want because I don't wanna confuse myself when I'm going into the dropdown with all these other accounts. I'd like to make the accounts that I'm actually going to be using. So we're gonna now then as we do the data input, I'm gonna close this back out. Do you want to leave it out saving? I'm gonna say yes. As we do the data input, I'm gonna go back into the chart of accounts which is in the accounting and close up the hamburger. We're gonna create our accounts as we go. So most of the time with the data inputs we got increases to cash, decreases to cash. The increases hopefully come from a customer. So the most basic thing to do would be to increase the income account when you've got deposits. We'll talk more about that in the future. And then every time we have an outflow, the most basic kind of thing would be it would be for something that we used in service of the business. Therefore we would be assigning an expense account typically to the outflows. That's in essence what we'll be doing in the future. And we'll create a custom account that will be tied to our bank feed types of transactions as we enter into the system. We'll talk more about different kinds of businesses and how bank feeds can kind of fit into them. But we will in essence for the most part be creating our system on kind of like a basic type of company that's able to rely more heavily on the bank not only being on a bank, on a cash basis but also being one step further in terms of ease relying on the actual bank transactions to in essence create the financial statements and then we'll create our accounts as we take that information in from the bank. So that's what's to look forward to in the future epic journey of the bank feeds practice file.