Connecting your American Express accounts to one bank feed in QuickBooks Online

You may have noticed in the last couple of weeks that the American Express (AMEX) bank connection in QuickBooks® Online switched to a multi-card setup, where each employee card gets its only account in the chart of accounts. This is great if you have two or three cards, but if you have half a dozen or more… well, it’s a real pain, especially if you have Expensify’s Domain Control setup.

Well, luckily, some very annoying bookkeepers whined about it to Intuit®, and they listened (mostly because I make a high pitched whine). If you’ve gone and reconnected your account to multi-card, you will need to disconnect your existing AMEX connection, re-enable a new connection that pulls transactions from the parent account, and perform some cleanup tasks for the interim.

Terms to know

• Parent Account: The main credit card.
• Child Account: The employee cards (the ones you can get rid of).
• Bank Feed: The stream of transactions that come into your banking screen in QuickBooks Online, aka a bank connection.
• Chart of Accounts: The accounts on the profit & loss, and balance sheet. In this chase, the child accounts will likely be a sub card of the parent card.

Here’s how to fix it

#1: For each chart of accounts, click the pencil to disconnect.

If you have multiple cards attached to one login, you will have to disconnect all of the feeds. In order to prevent duplication, if you are opting for the parent connection, there can only be one feed, otherwise there will be duplication.

#2: Next, reconnect the new AMEX bank feed connection (summarizes at the parent level).

#3: Click “add account.”

#4: When you click “add,” search for “American Express Credit card (US) – Parent accounts”

This is a new type of connection Intuit just added. It’s likely that going forward this is how they will handle business cards, rather than making you choose whichever way they chose to set it up with the bank. Yippee!

#5: Map to the parent chart of accounts.

The parent chart of accounts won’t have all the child card transactions for the interim period from September on through when you disconnect that connection. Select the date that you would like to pull historical transactions back to.

#6: Select the date range.

You’ll want to go ahead and pull from the date of the last reconciliation. Then you’re going to want to do one of the two following options:

1. Delete the added transactions for the child accounts back to the date of reconciliation.
2. Journal out the balance from the child accounts to the parent accounts

Which option should you choose? Well, #2 is faster, and #1 and much cleaner.

#7: Delete the child accounts.

This will not delete the transactions; instead, it will just make them inactive. No need to worry about losing your data.

That’s all – it’s fixed. Go forth and prosper!