The chart of account and reconciliation show the amount in foreign currency.  Bringing the balance of the foreign account to zero will not clear out the balance sheet amount which is showing your company accounts in native currency (CAD in my instance).

Work around is to change the foreign exchange on your last transaction of the account so as to match the native currency balance.  Ex. if foreign balance of 100 USD is showing on my balance sheet as 174 CAD on my balance sheet for whatever reason, I'll change the Fx on my transaction so that both the USD balance and CAD balance are back to zero.  Ex. Fx 1.74 in this instance.

You could also do it by creating two General Journal entry.  One entry at a foreign exchange of 1.00 regardless of your currency pair.  Then create a reversing entry but adjust the foreign exchange to remove the entire native currency outstanding balance.

Chart of account shows the foreign currency balance.

Balance sheet shows the value converted in your company currency

It's nice to see you here, Sebastien2.

Thank you for taking the time to post the workaround you've performed to resolve the discrepancy. I'm sure that this solution will also help other users who encountered the same problem.

The QuickBooks Community will always be around to lend you a hand any time you need guidance. I hope you have a great day!

econnolly - you were the first one to clearly articulate the problem and point out that the Quickbooks helpdesk is not answering the question at all.  I don't if they made a change to the software as I am looking at this issue six months later, but this is what I did and it appears to have worked. 

My issue is that I have a Euros bank account with a zero balance in the underlying register (which is tracked in EUR), but the balance sheet (which is in GBP) was still showing a balance.  I assume that the residual balance showing up on the BS is the result of exchange rate gains/losses that have accumulated in that account.  As you pointed out, if you post an entry to clear out the amount on the balance sheet, that entry will also go down into the underlying register and affect the balance there (which is already at zero).

What I did was post a journal entry, but I selected GBP as the currency instead of EUR.  Then I clicked the button that says "Home Currency Adjustment".  On my version of Quickbooks desktop, this appears just to the right of the box where you selected the currency to use for the journal entry.  I posted the AJE for the GBP amount that was appearing on the Balance Sheet with an offset to a P&L account "Exchange rate gains/losses".  This has cleared out the Balance Sheet for the Euros account.  And when I look at the underlying register, it is still zero.  This AJE carried over to the register, but it carried over as a memo transaction only with a -0- balance.  

econnolly - you were the first one to clearly articulate the problem and point out that the Quickbooks helpdesk is not answering the question at all. I don't know if they made a change to the software as I am looking at this issue six months later, but this is what I did and it appears to have worked.

My issue was that I have a bank account (in Euros) with a zero balance in the underlying register (which is tracked in Euros), but the balance sheet (which is in GBP) was still showing a balance. I assume that the residual balance showing up on the BS is the result of exchange rate gains/losses that have accumulated in that account. As you pointed out, if you post an entry to clear out the amount on the balance sheet, that entry will also go down into the underlying register and affect the balance there (which is already at zero).

What I did was post a journal entry, but I selected GBP as the currency instead of EUR. Then I clicked the button that says "Home Currency Adjustment". On my version of Quickbooks desktop, this appears just to the right of the box where you selected the currency to use for the journal entry. I posted the AJE for the GBP amount that was appearing on the Balance Sheet with an offset to a P&L account "Exchange rate gains/losses". This has cleared out the Balance Sheet for the Euros account. And when I look at the underlying register, it is still zero. This AJE carried over to the register, but it carried over as a memo transaction only with a -0- balance.

Honestly this doesn't sound like a solution to the problem. This just goes to show some of Quickbooks limitations. I run accounts for small businesses in Ghana and because of this I have to convert balance sheets to Excel to make adjustments for presentations for clients. It seems like a simple fix that Intuit has decided to ignore and it's quite frustrating. Might be time to migrate to another software

I am going to put the question in a way that hopefully avoids the 'ask an accountant' non-answer that I have read throughout this thread from QB staff:

How do I adjust the balance for a currency account shown on the balance sheet without affecting the figures QB uses for its bank transactions register?  This is not an 'accounting' question.  It is how does the software enable this common situation to be rectified - an event that clearly many others have encountered?

The number on the balance sheet and that on the bank transaction register have become unaligned, meaning that the bank transactions register shows and reconciles in my case to a zero balance, but the balance sheet indicates another amount.  I understand that the difference is to do with currency exchange differences (the way QB stores currencxy transactions), but I do not want to re-visit potentially hundreds of transactions that have caused that difference, I just want to be able to zero the figure on the balance sheet, without impacting the figure shown on the bank transactions register (which is, correctly, zero). How do I do that?

I am using Quickbooks Online Accountant.

I am using Quickbooks Online Accountant.

I have discovered how to do this. A particularly helpful QB consultant (online help) called Giedre advised as follows:

Head to : Settings ⚙.

>Select Currencies.

> choose the currency that has issue on balance sheet

> click on drop-down on the right side

> choose revalue currency

> choose which accounts needs to be revalued

> save it

> run ''balance sheet report'' to check it worked and review balance on bank transactions register (they should be the same)

When I did this QB suggested both the bank account with the issue and the currency's creditors account.  For the exercise I was doing, I just chose the bank account.  I did as suggested and the problem was taken care of.

Thank you rt2!  What a huge help this revaluation solution has been.  And it's so simple too.