Is there a way to correct an account balance in Quickbooks that deviates from reality? I have an account that is missing a lot of old history so shows a very wrong total.

It's great to see you in the Community, Antony.

I'll be glad to shed light on the non-matching balances of QuickBooks registers and actual accounts. This is a common situation for most businesses.

Possible scenarios are:

• You've recorded a cheque in QuickBook which was not en-cashed yet.
• There are deleted or duplicate transactions.
• You didn't put an opening balance in your account in QuickBooks
• There are pending payments waiting to be deposited to your actual account.

Most of the time, the account in QuickBooks and the actual account won't match. All you need to make sure is you can reconcile your transactions regularly.

Right now, you can compare your register transactions with your transactions in the bank statements. If there are duplicates or missing ones, delete or create them. If you missed entering an opening balance, you can create one now.

Please don't hesitate to go back to this thread if you have more questions.

Thanks for your reply. This is helpful in many cases, however I have set an opening balance but because of many gaps in the bank imports and possibly duplicates created too it's too hard to figure out the potentially hundreds of missing transactions and manually add them.

It's out by tens-of-thousands. What's the recommended procedure here? Alter the opening balance? Add a corrective transaction (will this mess up other calculations?), delete the accounts and start again (seems extreme)?

I think this might be the thing that pushes me to use something other than quickbooks. Thanks for you help though, the right answer is to reconcile it properly but frankly for me it's just too much effort. Better to start with a clean slate.