Ask the Accountant…
Question: I am connecting my bank account to my QuickBooks Online to automatically download data. What date do I put to start?
Answer: This seems like a simple thing, but choosing the wrong date to begin automatic downloading of data can cause you a great amount of unnecessary work.
Whatever date you pick, the data from that date forward will be downloaded into your QBO. If you pick a random date six months prior, for instance, you will have six months’ worth of transactions that will download even if you have already entered the data (as I hope you have). If you have duplicate data entered, you will still have to handle and exclude all those entries that are already in your QBO. It can be a lot of extra work.
My recommendation is to pick the start date to be the day after you last entered and reconciled data. For instance, if your data is entered and reconciled through April, you could pick May 1 as the date. That way, you should have hardly any overlap of duplicate data downloaded.
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