How Can You Find Uncleared Checks in QuickBooks Online?

Uncleared checks are one of the main reasons the bank balance and QuickBooks balance may be different on your banking or transactions page in QuickBooks Online.

When you do your regular bank reconciliation in QuickBooks Online you will be able to easily see if you have uncleared cheques.

When you have reconciled your account, if there are rows that are not greyed out, and that do not have a check mark on the right:

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These are uncleared checks.

Another way to locate uncleared checks is to look in the bank register.

Entries that do not have a C or an R alongside them have not been cleared. You will notice, these are the same transactions that were not cleared in our bank reconciliation.

Regular reconciliations are very important, so much so I have a checklist you can download to be sure you are ready to reconcile each month.  There is a link below, help yourself, and good luck finding your uncleared cheques and keeping your books in order.

Also check out my courses – if you have a mess to clean up the “Finding and Fixing Duplicated Transactions in QuickBooks Online” course will help you to sort everything out and get your numbers in order.

If you are new to QuickBooks Online, or are not sure how to most effectively work with the bank feed check out my Bank Feed Training course.

— My Cloud Bookkeeping Courses

— Bank Reconciliation Checklist‍

— Small Business Month-End Checklist

— QuickBooks Online Plan Comparison

Video transcript

Hi, Kerry here from My Cloud Bookkeeping. One of the questions I have received was “how do you find uncleared checks in QuickBooks online”? Now an un-cleared check is a check you have sent to somebody or given to somebody and it hasn't yet been presented to your bank. So they either haven't banked it or it's gone missing, or who knows. Now, one thing I will caution you here is be sure you're doing your regular reconciliation so that you know that you have uncleared checks. So yes, we're going to learn how to find them, but it's important that you reconcile regularly because an expense recorded by check will be showing up in your books and it hasn't gone through, perhaps something's gone weird with your bank feed, which happens quite often. Now I have a checklist, a whole pile of different things to help you with reconciliations. So be aware that if there is something wrong in your books, there are tools in the links below some different resources that will help you with that. If you have uncleared checks, it's important to void them and re-issue them. I have another video on how to do that. So now I'm going to walk through the steps of how to find those un-cleared checks so that you then can take care of them.

When you do regular bank reconciliations in QuickBooks Online, you'll be able to easily see if you have any un-cleared checks. So let's take a look. And if you want to know more about bank reconciliations, I have a lot of other videos showing you how to do those, both for the bank credit card, actually the same for either way, but let's have a quick look now. And here's one I prepared earlier. So here we have a reconciliation, as you can see, we've cleared this to zero, but your work is not over because there are items here that are still uncleared. So these are the un-cleared checks, you've sent them out, you've used them to pay bills or paid for something using a check. You can see the check numbers here and they haven't cleared. It's very important that you follow up with these, find out what's going on, perhaps you've made a mistake from the bank feed and double entered things, which is really common. I've got a course on that one if you've done that. But maybe these people just haven't banked their checks yet, this guy Chin's Gas and Oil are a couple here he just might not have been to the bank, so do follow up. Make sure that these things don't sit here for a long time, if it's just because someone hasn't banked it, that's great. But if it's an expense that could have been doubled up added in from the bank feed, then you want to know because your results are going to be incorrect.

Another way to find uncleared transactions is to have a look in the register. So I'm going to pop up here and click through to the bank register. You can see down here, we have this column that's kind of got a little check mark and this double box. So anything that has a double green box has come from the bank feed. QuickBooks is going to assume everything from the bank feed is correct. It just does that. So you'll need to uncheck that when you do your reconciliations so that it's not, and typically it will showup with a little C. Now, I've already done this reconciliation, so it's showing up with an R., Oh, here we go, here's a couple of Cs, that's for the bank reconciliation that we have in process. So you kind of get a little bit of an idea. These one here, yes, they're going to be cleared when we complete the reconciliation. These ones here are reconciled, so they've been cleared. If we pop up to the top here, it's going to say to scrolling, if we just click here and sort, here it is, here. So you can see here, these are the items that have not cleared yet. These are the ones that were showing up on our reconciliation as not having cleared. The other thing that you can do is pop over here and filter.

So you can filter by reconcile status for everything that's not reconciled and apply that. And then it's only going to show the amounts here that we haven't yet cleared—the un-cleared checks, and the ones that are waiting for us to finish our reconciliation. This is a good way to do things if you've got a lot of really old things, you just filter it out and you rather than trying to scroll and scroll and scroll, they'll show up here. You can actually do that filter by all of the statuses or not, just for not reconciled, the things that are cleared, and the things that are reconciled. So you've got that option in with the filters.

As I mentioned earlier, regular reconciliations are super important, so download that checklist, get going, make sure you’re reconciling on a regular basis. It's the only way you will know that your results are accurate, so you can properly manage your business, your cash flow, and everything else. If you have any other questions, do please make a note below, I'd love to hear from you. Click like, subscribe to my channel and I hope to see you again soon.

Cheers.