How to Reconcile a Credit Card in QuickBooks Online (Step-by-Step)

Reconciling your credit card in QuickBooks Online is one of the most important steps in keeping your books accurate. It’s also one of the most common places where small business owners and bookkeepers feel stuck, frustrated, or unsure whether they’ve done it correctly.

If your credit card balance never seems to match, or you’re clicking through reconciliation screens without really understanding what’s happening, this guide will walk you through the process clearly and calmly.

The goal of reconciliation isn’t just to “get to zero.” It’s to make sure your financial reports actually reflect reality.

Why Credit Card Reconciliation Matters

Your credit card account affects more than just expenses. If it isn’t reconciled properly, it can throw off:

• Your balance sheet
• Your profit and loss
• Your cash flow reporting
• Your confidence in the numbers
  

Reconciling ensures that every charge, payment, fee, and credit showing in QuickBooks matches what actually happened on your credit card statement.

If something is missing or duplicated, reconciliation is where you catch it.

What to Do Before You Start Reconciling

Before opening the reconciliation screen, take a moment to review your credit card transactions.

Go to your Bank Transactions area in QuickBooks Online and confirm that:

• All transactions from the statement period have been added
• Nothing is still sitting in “For Review”
• There are no obvious duplicates
• Charges are categorized correctly
  

Reconciliation works best when the bank feed has already been reviewed and cleaned up. Skipping this step is one of the biggest reasons reconciliations don’t balance.

How Credit Card Reconciliation Works in QuickBooks Online

When you reconcile a credit card, QuickBooks is asking one simple question:

Do the transactions in your books match the credit card statement for this period?

To answer that, you’ll need:

• The statement ending date
• The statement ending balance
  

QuickBooks compares that information to what’s recorded in your credit card register and calculates the difference. Your job during reconciliation is to check off transactions that appear on the statement until that difference reaches zero.

Common Reasons a Credit Card Won’t Reconcile

If your reconciliation doesn’t balance right away, that doesn’t mean something is “wrong.” It usually means something needs to be reviewed.

Some common causes include:

• A transaction was entered twice
• A charge or payment is missing
• A payment was recorded to the wrong account
• A transaction was dated incorrectly
• Fees or interest were overlooked
  

This is why reconciliation should never feel rushed. It’s a review process, not a race.

How to Know When You’re Done

A completed reconciliation should show a $0.00 difference.

That zero means:

• Your statement and QuickBooks agree
• All activity for the period is accounted for
• Your credit card balance on the balance sheet is reliable
  

Once the reconciliation is complete, QuickBooks locks those transactions in place. This protects your reports and ensures changes aren’t made accidentally later.

A Note About Month-End Close

Credit card reconciliation is a key part of your month-end close process. It works best when done consistently and in the same order every month.

When credit cards are reconciled regularly:

• Errors are easier to spot
• Financial reports are more trustworthy
• Year-end cleanup is far less stressful
  

If reconciliation feels confusing or time-consuming, it’s often a sign that something earlier in the workflow needs adjusting.

Reconciliation isn’t about perfection. It’s about clarity.

Once you understand what QuickBooks is asking you to confirm and why, the process becomes much less intimidating. Over time, you’ll start to recognize patterns and spot issues more quickly which is exactly what good bookkeeping is meant to support.

Helpful Resources

Download my Small Business Month-End Checklist to stay organized and confident every month:

https://learn.mycloudbookkeeping.org/small-business-month-end-checklist

Compare QuickBooks Online plans to make sure you’re using the right one for your business:

https://www.mycloudbookkeeping.org/quickbooks-plan-comparison

How to Reconcile a Credit Card in QuickBooks Online

Today we’re doing a credit card reconciliation in QuickBooks Online.

Reconciliation is an essential part of good bookkeeping. It’s how you confirm that the balances in QuickBooks match the bank, and it helps identify errors that might otherwise sit unnoticed

I’m Kerry from My Cloud Bookkeeping.
Let’s dive right in.

 So here we are in our sample company and we've actually opened to the bank transactions page, uh, the page that I still refer to as the bank feed. So if you ever see any information where I'm referring to the bank feed, this is the feed that connects to your bank and brings in all the credit card transactions.

If you don't open to this page, then you pop over to all apps, accounting, bank transactions, and you can bookmark it. Then whenever you are looking for it, in future, you can pop up to the bookmarks and it'll be right there easy for you to find. So we are gonna be reconciling the MasterCard today and before we start reconciling.

You always wanna come and take a look at your bank feed, bank transactions, and ensure that you have categorized or matched all of the transactions for the period you're going to be reconciling. And in this case, we're reconciling November. So the first row here, you can see Tanya's nurse has matched.

It's the same date. It's the same amount. We're gonna click match and it's still here. That's a little odd. So match again. Um. I think because it's the sample company, this just isn't going away. We're gonna have to ignore it. For now, it's, it's an error in the file that won't happen in your file, I'm sure of it.

So let's take a look at the next one that matches Nor Lumber matches. So take a look at Squeaky Clean. There are two potential matches. You can see a charge on the 19th and the 26th, 19th.

We match to the 19th and then the 26th automatically matches. So other than this bizarre transaction that we cannot get to match, everything for November has now been taken care of and we can commence reconciling.

We have a couple of transactions here from December. We don't need to worry about those. We're doing a reconciliation for November, so now we can commence. Reconciling

so the first thing you're going to wanna do is make sure you have selected the correct account at the top, and then grab your statement. So you can see here I've created a credit card statement for November 30th, and here is the October 31st balance. You wanna compare that to the beginning balance that you have in QuickBooks, because that will tell us whether or not we're starting from the right place.

Here we go. October 31st, beginning balance matches to the amount that we have on our statement

so now we enter in the ending balance. Into QuickBooks and the date of our statement. Typically, a credit card statement is not going to be the end of the month, but for the sake of this exercise, we're going with November 30th, we click start reconciling.

You can see that QuickBooks has decided to put green check marks alongside the transactions that came from the bank feed. What we're going to do is we're gonna select all and deselect, because I wanna show you how to do a reconciliation when things don't work out immediately. So we're gonna put a check mark up at the top, select everything. And you can see it's actually reconciled. And we could go from now, but we're not going to, we're gonna uncheck everything and we'll go through the steps because if something doesn't work, you need to know what to do.

We're gonna look at the transactions on the credit card statement and then compare those directly to what's in QuickBooks. And this is really important. I, I cannot stress this enough that you look at the statement. Then check off QuickBooks.

So let's go. We have 88 0 9 to 88, 0 9 54, 92 to 54 92. 82 45. That's the amount that we couldn't match. 82 45. The next one is 74 86. Notice we're going from the statement, not QuickBooks. This is how you can be methodical and ensure that you do it accurately. 112. One hundred and twelve seventy four thirty six.

74. 36. 52 56. 52 56. Now if you had multiple pages. Things didn't work out easily. It's one of the few times where I'd actually suggest printing something out and then literally checking it off by pencil mark. I do that sometimes when things don't work. A hundred and three, fifty five, fifty six, fifty nineteen ninety nine, eighteen ninety seven, forty two forty nineteen ninety nine.

And $900. Now,, there we go. . So now you can see everything is fully reconciled we have a zero difference, and it's important to check that there are no other transactions. You can see all of our transactions have green check marks.

If there were still some transactions hanging out there, you would want to check why. Maybe we'd recorded them twice or something else could have gone wrong. But no, we're good. Everything matched. We're reconciled to zero.

And finish now and we're done

and we're ready to start the next month's reconciliation.

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Cheers.

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