Exclude or Undo Bank Transactions in QuickBooks Online

This guide follows Intuit’s help article “Exclude a bank transaction you downloaded into QuickBooks Online.” Intuit says you may sometimes want to keep a downloaded transaction from going into your company expenses. When you exclude a transaction, it does not appear in any account registers or financial reports.

Intuit notes that exclusion can make account reconciliation easier or harder depending on the transaction type, and that if the transaction is a duplicate you may need to fix the duplicates first.

Intuit’s web steps are:

1. Go to All apps, then Accounting, then Bank transactions.

2. Select the Pending tab.

3. Select the checkbox for each transaction to exclude.

4. Select Exclude.

The transaction moves to the Excluded tab of the Banking page. Intuit also gives separate steps for its Android and iOS apps, which begin at Menu, Transactions, then Review transactions. Because the apps differ, follow Intuit’s current article for them.

Other Intuit articles refer to the same holding area as the For review tab, so the label may differ in your account.

If you excluded the wrong transaction, Intuit calls it easy to fix. On the web, select the Excluded tab, select the transaction’s checkbox, then select Undo. The transaction returns to the For review tab so you can handle it again.

A synthetic example: you exclude a 120.00 line labeled “Studio Rent” by mistake. After Undo, it is back in the review list, where you can categorize or match it normally.

This is a different action from undoing an exclusion. Intuit’s matching article says that to undo a match you open the Posted tab under Transactions, select the account, find the transaction and select Undo. QuickBooks moves it back to Pending (or For review) for correction.

Intuit’s duplicates article describes the same idea on the Categorized tab, which it says may be called Posted: open the link in the Added or Matched column and select Undo, then match or exclude the transaction. If the transaction is part of another transaction, it says to undo that match first.

The exclusion article itself does not cover undoing categorization or matching, and the matching article does not state time limits or what happens with reconciled records. If a record has been reconciled, speak to your accountant before changing it.

Intuit says that once a downloaded transaction is accepted or excluded, QuickBooks stops the bank from bringing it into the feed again. If you remove it by deleting instead of excluding, the system will recognize the transaction is not accounted for and will download the same transaction again from the bank.

For personal expenses, Intuit says it is best to add the transaction to QuickBooks rather than exclude it, because otherwise your QuickBooks bank account will not match your bank statement when you reconcile. It says many owners record personal expenses to an equity account called an owner’s draw, and recommends consulting an accountant or bookkeeper when unsure.

If you review statement lines in a spreadsheet before deciding what to exclude, PDFtoRow can convert a bank statement PDF to Excel or CSV.