next statement reconcile beginning balance is off exactly by the bank service fee

Welcome back, acmd,

I'm glad to see that you're taking care of reconciliations in your QuickBooks Desktop company file. They're just as important as other bookkeeping tasks, especially when it comes to making sure everything is in balance. I'm here to help you get back on track and moving forward with this process.

When you notice a beginning balance is off, there are a number of places you can look in the program to see what might be causing the issue. Luckily, we've got an article that outlines these steps so that you can work through them at your leisure. Check out the Fix beginning balance issues in QuickBooks Desktop article and scroll to the To fix an incorrect balance heading to get started. The first portion of the article is for when you're reconciling for the very first time, so the section I've highlighted will help you with your next steps since you've already completed a reconciliation.

I've also got our article that takes you step by step through the reconciliation process: Reconcile an account in QuickBooks Desktop. From what you've described, it sounds like you're on the right path, but this article can be used to compare your steps just to be sure.

Give those a shot to start and then let me know how it goes. I'll be around if you still need help with this!

Hi Laura,

Looking at the Reconciliation for the next month (the starting balance is incorrect), I clicked on Locate Discrepancies > Discrepancy Report. This shows the Bank Service Fee that I entered from the previous month as Uncleared. I believe clearing this transaction will show me the correct starting balance for the next month. How do I clear this transaction?

Another detail which might be important is I'm using Bank Feeds, but the Bank Service Fee that I entered in the previous month's Reconciliation appears as Matched in the Match Transactions dialog. 

Hi acmd. I'm glad you've made progress on your reconciliation. I'll be happy to pick up form here and help you get on track with an accurate reconciliation. Based on what you've described, I encourage you to check out this article here. The article goes in detail on how to handle cleared and uncleared transactions. I encourage you to check it out and if you have questions, feel free to reach back to me in the comments below. I'll be on standby. 

Ok this is pointing me in the right direction I think, but I have more questions:

"Reconciled/cleared transactions are showing as uncleared. This occur when a future date is entered in the Statement Date field of the Begin Reconciliation window."

This leads me to an important detail. The previous reconciliation was for Jan 2020 which I set the Statement Date for it in the Begin Reconciliation window to "Jan 31, 2020." The Bank Service Charge was also set to "Jan 31, 2020." 

1. Is the Statement Date in the Begin Reconciliation window supposed to be the Start or End date of the statement. For example if I'm reconciling January, should it be January 1, 2020 or January 31, 2020? My actual statement says "Dec 31, 2019 - Jan 31, 2020" although the only thing from Dec 31 is the balance forward from Dec 2019.
2. Would the Statement Date and Bank Service Charge being the same date cause the Bank Service Charge to be uncleared after reconciliation?

I answered #2 myself. I undid the previous reconciliation, manually deleted the Bank Service Charge check, then tried redoing the Reconciliation. I set the Bank Service Charge to Jan 30, 2020 and the Statement Date to Jan 31, 2020, and it still showed as uncleared after reconciling.

At this point I'm kind of stuck. I've reviewed the link you sent and these topics are the only ones that MIGHT be relevant to my situation.

• Cleared transactions appear as uncleared - this is not the case. The Bank Service Charge is dated Jan 31, 2020, which isn't in the future of today's date (Oct 26, 2020) or the Statement Date (Jan 31, 2020).
• The beginning and ending balances on the report are incorrect - I already know why the beginning balance for the next reconciliation period is wrong. It's due to the uncleared Bank Service Charge. I just don't know how to ensure it's cleared.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here. In the past (in previous QB desktop company files), I've just used the Make General Journal Entries for bank service fees and didn't make use of the Reconciliation (or the built-in Service Charge) feature. Now I want to properly manage my QB desktop file and make use of these features and I'm hitting a wall. I think my use case is pretty straight forward and it's literally a brand new company file where I've set the (correct) beginning balance of the bank account and this is the first reconciliation of the account. There's nothing special or weird that I can see. 

Any more suggestions would be helpful 

Thanks for getting back to me. Based on what you've described, I highly recommend reaching out to your accountant for expert advice on this. Reaching out to an accounting professional helps prevent errors in your books.  If you're not in contact with one I suggest searching for one on our site. Your accountant may advise you to record the bank charge as a cheque. Once you've done this, you can manually clear the cheque using the steps below:

1. From the Lists menu choose Chart of Accounts.
2. Locate the account and double-click on it.
3. Find the cheque you've created
4. Put a checkmark to clear the cheque.

To answer question #1, it's advised that you use the date when the transaction cleared your bank. Please verify with your accountant on this in order to prevent any discrepancies. I've also left this question open in the Community so other Community members can chime in and share their advice. Feel free to ask questions. 

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@JamesM wrote:
To answer question #1, it's advised that you use the date when the transaction cleared your bank. Please verify with your accountant on this in order to prevent any discrepancies. 

Yes the bank service charge is dated the same date as what was on my statement: Jan 31, 2020, same date as the statement end date.

Anyway, I was able to accidentally solve this and it seems like it's a problem with how QB logs the bank charge.

Steps I took:

1. Go to Banking > Reconcile and enter the appropriate information including using the Bank Charges field for my bank service charge
2. Click Continue, select all the items to make sure everything balances. Press Reconcile Now.
3. Immediately after reconciliation, the bank charge is logged, but shows as Uncleared in the report. The next Starting Balance is off exactly the amount of the bank service charge. 
4. At this point, I performed an Undo Last Reconciliation. Whenever I tried this before, it shows a warning that the bank service charge that was created by the Reconciliation won't get deleted, so I always manually deleted it and started the reconciliation again. This time I left the bank charge check payment and started the Reconciliation over.
5. Enter all the reconciliation info again, except DON'T enter the bank charge here. There's already a check added from the previous try.
6. Press Continue and select all the transactions including the Bank Charge check from before. At this point everything balances like before. Press Reconcile Now.

Now the bank charge is cleared and the next Starting Balance is correct.

NOTE: After Step 3, all the transactions in the Bank Feed are automatically matched in the Bank Feeds Centre including the bank service charge after the reconciliation.

This is very reproducible.

Hi acmd,

I'm glad to hear you were able to sort this out! Thanks for sharing with us the detailed steps you've taken to have your bank service charge as cleared. You are always welcome to reach out if you have more questions.

Take care.

Hi acmd. I appreciate the time you've invested in this. Thanks for outlining the steps that have worked for you. I'll forward this to our engineers so they can take a look into this. If you'd like to go over this with our support specialists, feel free to contact us using the details in this link here. Let me know if you have questions.