Business exclusively using personal checking account for business

Hello there. Thanks for choosing QuickBooks Online (QBO) as your partner in managing your books. I'm here to share some information about using a personal checking account for personal and business transactions.

In QBO, it's not recommended to mix your business and personal expenditures. The accounts you connect should be for business-only purposes to avoid confusion when tracking the income and expenses of your business.

That said, yes, you can connect your bank account to QBO and choose only the business income and expenses transactions on the Banking page.

1. Connect your bank account to QBO.
2. Once done, go to the Banking menu and select the Banking tab.
3. Next, select the bank account you recently connected.
4. Then, navigate to the For Review tab.
5. From there, look for the expense and income transaction with the Add option in the Action column.
6. Click it to expand the view and review the recommended Category. You can change the category, account, vendor, or customer as needed.
7. Review and add any other information that may be mandatory or missing.
8. When everything looks good, click Add.

Once everything is fine, you can now proceed in reconciling your bank account. 

For more information, please read this article: Mixing business and personal funds.

In case you want to reimburse the money back to the personal account, you can follow Step 2 of this link: Pay for business expenses with personal funds. 

If you have other concerns about managing your transactions, please don't hesitate to leave a reply below. Have a good one and stay safe. 

Is there a way to manually enter income that was deposited into a personal checking account when that checking account isn't linked to QuickBooks?

I know with the expenses portion I can just enter Expenses and zero them out with the Owner's Investment account, but I'm not quite sure how to handle the Income portion.

Great to have you back here in the Community forum, Maria. I appreciate you raising your queries here.

Yes, there are a few ways of manually entering income transactions in QuickBooks Online (QBO). Before anything else, if you have not created a checking account intended for your income transactions in QBO yet, you have to make one first.

Once the account has been created, you can manually record income entries in QBO. You can either choose to record the transactions as Invoices, Sales Receipts, or Journal Entry.

Let me guide you through the steps on how:

To record the income transaction as an Invoice, here's how:
 

1. In your QBO account, click on +New, then select Invoice.
2. Enter the necessary information.
3. Once done, click on Save and Close.

For detailed information, kindly visit: Create invoices in QuickBooks Online.

You can then proceed to receive the invoice payment, here's how:
 

1. In your QBO account, click on +New, then select Receive payment.
2. In the Deposit to field, select the checking account you created.

For detailed information, kindly visit: Record invoice payments in QuickBooks Online.

Or you can choose to record these transactions as Sales Receipts or a Journal Entry.

Moreover, I'll also share this article that can serve as your reference if you want to learn how to get transactions from your bank or credit cards and manually import them into QBO: Manually upload transactions into QuickBooks Online.

Feel free to leave a reply if you have additional QuickBooks-related queries. The Community team always has your back. Have a good one.

I know how to enter income. 

The issue is I would like to enter income that was deposited into a personal checking account that is not linked to QuickBooks. 

Let me dive into this thread to get you assisted with adding your income manually in QuickBooks Online (QBO), Maria.

To enter your income transactions that were deposited into your personal checking account. We can set this up as a clearing or wash account and transfer it to your business checking account. Moreover, a clearing account is a temporary account in which the funds are kept to get them smoothly transferred or to keep them there.

To start, let’s get prepared with the clearing account that we will be using to add the transactions. Here’s how:

1. Sign in to your QuickBooks account and go to Accounting on the left-side panel.
2. Select Chart of Accounts.
3. On the Chart of Accounts screen, click the New button.
4. Choose Banks for the account type. Then select Bank Accounts under Save account under* dropdown.
5. Type in the Name and other information for the clearing account.
6. Make sure you do not type in any amount on the balance before clicking Save and Close.

After that, you can start creating the invoice to record this income and record its payments to the Undeposited Funds (UF). You can also refer to DHeraV's steps for creating the invoice and recording payments. Then, you can now record the bank deposit in QBO to the clearing account you recently created. It is to match your real-life bank balance to what you have in QuickBooks.

Once done, we’re now ready to transfer the funds from your clearing account to your business checking account:

1. Go to the + New icon and click Transfer.
2. In the Transfer Funds From choose your clearing account.
3. Choose your business checking account in the Transfer Funds To.
4. Enter the balance in the Transfer Amount section and enter additional details you may have.
5. Then, click Save and close.
   

    

In addition, I have a set of articles that you can use to organize your transactions and reconcile your account. By doing this, you can classify your transactions correctly and prevent any discrepancies in your books:

• Categorize and match online bank transactions in QuickBooks Online
• Reconcile an account in QuickBooks Online

Let me know if you have more concerns about adding a processing fee. I’m just a post away. Have a good one!

Thank you for these answers.  I am using QB for Self Employment but I couldn't open a Business Checking account until half way of running my business.  All payments and expenses were made using my personal check book for four months.  What is the best way to enter the transactions?  Moving forward I will only use my business account of course.  I need to enter payments to invoices, and enter expenses including setup expenses.  How do I do that?  I already worked on the business bank link.  Can I enter the transactions from my personal bank manually?  

I appreciate you providing detailed information about your questions regarding transactions from your personal bank, Pascua.

I can offer a way to handle them in QuickBooks Self-Employed.

You can manually add transactions by utilizing a CSV file. Many banks allow you to download transactions from their website in CSV format.

Once you have the CSV file, import it to QBSE. Here's how:

1. Navigate to the Profile ⚙ icon and select Imports.
2. Select Import transactions.
3. Follow the onscreen steps to upload the CSV file.
4. Select Import.

Additionally, you can assign categories to the transactions to ensure they are allocated correctly on the relevant line of your Schedule C: Categorize transactions in QuickBooks Self-Employed.

If you have anything else you need help with managing bank transactions, please let me know by adding a comment below. I'm here to assist you in any way I can.