How do I unclear a G/L journal entry created during cleanup process

Trust me, MEBdot, you do NOT want to clear all of the journal entries. You will be looking at more problems than it is worth. Plus, you do not want to mess with prior year since Taxe return have already been done. That is why the books are closed for prior years.

Try and reconcile and see what the Difference is. Is the Difference really off by a huge amount or not? Would it be better off just to start a new file?

Laura Kaniuk

The journal entries are already cleared. I want to unclear them. The Journal entries are generated by doing the "Cleanup" process where they combine many checks for a single day into one journal entry and then arbitrarily clear them. The fact that they are cleared is my problem. I do not want to create or change any entries. The check register balance is correct.

The only problem is the begin balance in the reconcilation process shows as a -7,589,345.10 because of these cleared G/L entries. I want the starting balance to be 0. I could then do a reconcile through the end of the year using 0 as the start balance and the ending balance from the 12/31/2008 bank statement. Once that is done we can reconcile each month in a normal way.

I just need to clear those generated G/L entries for this to work.

Again MEBdot, I say do NOT do this. Sorry.

For one, you said you can't get to the prior year because the books are closed for prior year. You would need the password to unlock this which I do not recommend.

In addition, what you want to do is not going to work. Just because you unclear the G/L is not going to get the bank reconcilation Beginning balance to show zero. It just isn't going to happen.

Perhaps, looking into starting a new company file would be best. The new year hss just begun, why not start 2009 off the correct way? Less headaches, less frustration, less problems.

Laura K

You may want to consider making a backup copy of this file to an external drive ( so you don't get them mixed up - a flash drive would work ) and then you could test your theory on this outside copy.

If I read correctly, the client just went through the register and manually checked off each of the entries? As though they were doing it on paper? If this is the case, then unchecking them really isn't a problem because nothing was ever reconciled through QB to begin with. If you test your theory on an outside copy, then you won't mess up your books and you'll know if it works.

If you absolutely need to start a new company file, you can export all your vendors, customers, lists, etc. so they don't need to be recreated; unfortunately you will loose the ability to have the autofill feature when creating a document for the first time for each vendor, custormer, and list item. As an outside bookkeeper, if you don't know what product a vendor supplies etc, it could be timeconsuming to research each transaction. I understand there is a third party product which will work with QB so that you could actually export current outstanding invoices so that you don't need to enter those manually; that would be very helpful. But since creating a new company file can be time-consuming ( if the client has large databases ) an outside test file might be worth a sidetrip to see if you can salvage this company file.

Unfortunately there is no option for clearing the G/L generated entries. If there was, it would have been an easy process of just unclearing all previously cleared entries (and yes the math worked where this would have balanced).

For anyone reading this thread I will give you what I ended up doing. I created another bank account. I then moved all checks/deposits that were not cleared as of 12/31/2008 to the new account. What I ended up with as an ending balance in the old account was zero. The amount in the new account was the ending balance from the bank statement. I was then able to reconcile January in the normal way. I then changed the G/L account number on the old account to something not used, and changed the new account to the old number. I then changed payroll and some company preferences to default to the new account.

Life goes on...