JE made to deleted account

Hi Pat,

Welcome back and thanks for the details about what's going on in your QuickBooks Desktop company file. It's great to hear that you've been evolving how to better manage your books using the program, and I'm here to help sort out what's going on with the deleted account being used in a journal entry.

I can appreciate how having a journal use the deleted account would be confusing, and you've taken good troubleshooting steps up to this point. Checking the Chart of Accounts for inactive accounts is a particularly great step because once an account has been used, it cannot be deleted. Meaning, if the account in question was used at any point before the separation into two company files, it should still be somewhere in the account list of the CoA. If the account was never used, however, it can be deleted. Here's a visual of the message that would pop up when trying to delete an account that's been used in any way, even if it currently has a zero balance.

Since you're not seeing the account in the CoA, I have a few suggestions for you. The first is to re-sort lists to make sure that all the items that should be showing in lists like the Chart of Accounts are actually showing. I recommend taking this step whether the account was used previously or not, just to be sure that it somehow hasn't hung around in the books. This process gives the program a refresh by putting things back in their default order. This article explains the process and gives you the steps to follow: Re-sort lists in QuickBooks Desktop

After doing that, check the Chart of Accounts again to see if that deleted account is now showing when you include the inactive accounts in your list. If it is, it could be that the account was for some reason made active, allowing the other user to create that journal entry.

The next suggestion I have for you is to check for data damage to the company file, especially if the account was actually never used and was fully deleted. There are a few steps to take, but don't worry, there's another article to guide you through this process: Fix data damage on your QuickBooks Desktop company file

Ultimately, you should be able to correct the journal entry to use the account you'd like. It sounds like you know how to make your way back to the journal, but just in case, here's one method you can consider.

1. Go to the Edit menu.
2. Choose Find.
3. Select Transaction Type from the Filter options.
4. Choose Journal from the drop-down menu.
5. Set other filters as desires.
6. Click Find.

Once you've got that populated, you can double-click the entry to reopen it and make necessary changes.

Let me know if that helps. I want to make sure your books are good to go to continue accurately recording the transactions.

Take care.  :)