What are 2 ways you can clean up chart of accounts to reduce the number of accounts shown?

Thanks for visiting the Intuit Community, jeanne,

I’d be glad to share information on how to delete an account in QuickBooks Online.

You can delete accounts in QuickBooks Online that are no longer in use. Need not to worry, deleting accounts doesn’t erase your transactions, so your reports won’t change. You also have an option to restore deleted accounts any time.

To delete an account, here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Click on the gear icon at the top.
2. Under Your Company section, select Chart of Accounts (COA).
3. Look for the account that you want to delete.
4. In the Action column, choose the drop-down then click Delete.
5. Click Yes when asked if you want to delete.

Once you delete an account, it will be removed in the Chart of Accounts. The good thing is, you can filter the COA page to include inactive or deleted accounts. You can refer to the attached screenshot for guidance.

For detailed steps, here’s how:

1. Click Accounting from the left menu.
2. Click the gear icon above the Action column.
3. Put a checkmark in the Include inactive box.
4. Once done, search the deleted account in the search bar.

Here’s an article about how to delete an account and restore it for more detailed information.

As always, you can contact our QuickBooks Customer Care support if you need assistance with the steps. They'll be able to help you navigate using one of their tools.

Please feel free to come back in if you have further questions about deleting accounts in QuickBooks Online, I’m always here to answer it for you.

In our last post we talked about setting up and editing accounts in QuickBooks Online (QBO). We find that QuickBooks users, both desktop and online, often end up with too many accounts. It is far more likely that, over time, they will create too many rather than too few accounts.

You, the QBO user, may realize this when you access a profit and loss report. The report seems to stretch to far too many pages.

It may become difficult to compare expenses in certain categories over consecutive months or years. Those expenses have been posted to an ever increasing number of expense accounts that no longer line up side by side on the profit and loss.

It is more and more difficult to determine whether or not a certain expense is becoming too large compared to income. That expense total is broken into several rows on the profit and loss report (separate accounts). This forces the person analyzing the report to total by hand several numbers to see what the total office expense (for example) really is.

There are a couple of ways you can re-organize your chart of accounts.

One that we mentioned in the previous post was using subaccounts.

You can see in the above screenshot the use of subaccounts under the parent account “Legal and Professional Fees.”

The next parent account on the list is Maintenance and Repair. If you could see the entire list, you would find that there are several repair expense accounts.

Building Repairs is an account alphabetically listed farther up the list. So is Computer Repairs. Equipment Repairs is in order with the other accounts beginning with E.

If we want to clean up this part of our chart of accounts, we have a couple of choices.

If we only care about maintenance and repairs costs as a total, we could merge accounts.

Another alternative is to make the three repair expense accounts subaccounts of Maintenance and Repair. If we choose this option, the accounts will list together on the list just like the accounts under Legal and Professional Fees.

Here is how these accounts will appear on a profit and loss report:

The more drastic option is to merge them. A subaccount does not need to be the same detail type as its parent, so this does not affect editing the repair accounts to be subs. The accounts do, however, need to be the same detail type in order to merge.

Merging an account involves editing one so that the name, as long as type, detail, etc. are the same, is an exact match to another account on the list. This makes the two accounts one. All transactions that referred to the two accounts, are now posted in the one remaining account.

This obviously affects all transactions, changing all prior years. It is not reversible.

The safer solution is to use the subaccount alternative. Then, if you do not want the detail in the accounts you have made subs, delete them.

Delete does not actually erase the account, but makes it inactive. This solution allows the account, if it has a balance, to appear where necessary on reports. It will not be available for creating new transactions.

In time, as you move into future years, the inactive account balance will not show on reports like the profit and loss.

More on Standard Chart of Accounts…

Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
954-414-1524

What are 2 ways you can clean up her chart of accounts?

How do I reduce the number of accounts in QuickBooks?

How can chart of accounts improve?

How do you adjust a chart of accounts?