How to make a journal entry in QuickBooks Online and a general journal entry in Desktop, the rules QuickBooks enforces, and when a journal entry is wrong.
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A QuickBooks journal entry posts a debit and a matching credit straight to the general ledger, without going through an invoice, a bill or a bank transaction. In QuickBooks Online you create one from the + Create button (labeled + New in the older interface) and then Journal entry. In QuickBooks Desktop it is Company > Make General Journal Entries. Total debits have to equal total credits before QuickBooks will let you save.
Last updated August 2026. Intuit is rolling out a redesigned QuickBooks Online interface, so menu labels differ between accounts. Where the new and old names differ, both are given below.
The harder question is not how to post one. It is whether you should. A large share of the journal entries small businesses write exist only because a month of bank or credit card activity never made it into QuickBooks, and someone decided to force the balance with a single lump sum. That works on the balance sheet and fails everywhere else: the lump sum will not categorize, it will not match against the bank feed line by line, and it turns the next reconciliation into guesswork. If that is your situation, converting the PDF statement to a .qbo file and uploading it puts every transaction in as a real bank transaction instead, which is what the rest of QuickBooks is built to work with.
Built for the statements US banks actually send, checked before it exports.
The converter adds up the transactions it parsed and matches that to the statement total before you export, so nothing is silently dropped.
Valid OFX 1.02 with QuickBooks Web Connect headers. Online and Desktop import it as a standard bank feed.
OCR runs before parsing, so a scanned or photographed paper statement comes out the same as a digital PDF.
Bulk upload for catch-up and cleanup work. Each file gets its own reconciliation check and its own exports.
Enter the password on upload. Multi-column and multi-page statement layouts are parsed too.
One conversion, three files: the .qbo for QuickBooks, an XLSX to review, and a CSV for everything else.
Three steps. No column-mapping wizard.
Drag in a PDF, a scan, or a phone photo. Password-protected and multi-page files are fine.
Every transaction is extracted and checked against the statement total. You see the parsed rows before exporting.
Download the .qbo and import it as a Web Connect bank feed. Excel and CSV are in the same download.
The specifics that decide whether the import is clean. If your case is not here, email [email protected].
Six steps, and the only one people get wrong is the last. QuickBooks Online will not save an unbalanced entry, so if the Save button refuses you, the debit and credit columns do not agree.
Skipping the memo is the most expensive shortcut on this list. Six months later, an unlabeled four-figure entry between two balance sheet accounts is nearly impossible to justify to an accountant or an auditor, and you will spend longer reconstructing it than the entry took to write.
Desktop keeps the older accounting vocabulary and calls the same transaction a general journal entry.
Desktop also lets you memorize a general journal entry you post every month, such as depreciation or a prepaid insurance amortization, so the numbers do not get retyped and mistyped each period.
It is the same thing as a journal entry. QuickBooks Desktop calls it a general journal entry, QuickBooks Online just calls it a journal entry, and both post directly to the general ledger in debit and credit form. The word general refers to the general journal, the book of original entry that holds anything not captured by a specialized journal like sales or purchases. There is no separate feature to go looking for.
Four constraints catch people, and three of them produce an error message rather than a wrong number, which is the good outcome.
The fourth constraint has no error message at all, and it is the one that costs real time: a journal entry cannot be matched to a downloaded bank transaction line by line. More on that below.
A journal entry bypasses every subledger QuickBooks maintains. That is exactly what you want for depreciation and exactly what you do not want for anything a customer, a vendor or a bank was involved in. The table below covers the substitutions that come up most often.
| What you are trying to record | Why a journal entry is the wrong tool | Use this instead |
|---|---|---|
| A month of bank or credit card activity that never downloaded | A lump sum has no payee, no category and no detail, so nothing reconciles and every report stays generic | Convert the PDF statement to a .qbo file and upload it, so each transaction posts individually |
| A payment a customer sent you | The invoice stays open and the A/R aging overstates what you are owed | Receive payment against the invoice |
| A bill you owe a vendor | The bill never appears in Pay bills and the A/P aging is wrong | Enter a Bill, then pay it from Pay bills |
| Money moved between two accounts you own | Works, but neither side matches cleanly in the bank feed and duplicates are easy to create | Use the Transfer form |
| Bank fees, interest and service charges on the statement | Hand keying them means retyping numbers you already have in the statement | They come in automatically with the statement import as normal expenses |
| Depreciation, accruals, prepaid amortization, owner contributions, reclassifications | Nothing wrong here | A journal entry is the correct tool |
The pattern is easy to remember. If a real person or a real bank account was on the other side of the transaction, use the form QuickBooks built for it. If the entry only moves value between accounts on paper, a journal entry is right.
QuickBooks Online can match a downloaded bank transaction to an entire journal entry, provided the bank account, the amount and the date all line up. What it cannot do is match a downloaded transaction to a single line of a journal entry. That distinction decides whether your month closes cleanly.
Say you post one entry covering a month of card spending, split across eight expense accounts, with the card account credited for the total. Forty individual charges then download from the bank. None of them will match, because each one is looking for a transaction of its own size and the only thing available is the total. You are left excluding all forty and clearing the journal entry by hand in the register, which is a real technique but not one you want to repeat every month.
QuickBooks also declines to match when the amounts or dates disagree, when the transaction is more than about six months old, when it has already been matched to something else, or when it was reconciled previously. If a match you expect is missing, turn off the suggested matches filter first so QuickBooks shows the full candidate list rather than its shortlist.
Reversing is safer than deleting because it leaves the original in place and creates an offsetting entry, so the history of the correction stays visible. In QuickBooks Online, open the entry, select Edit, then Reverse. QuickBooks creates a new entry carrying the original entry number followed by an R, dated the first day of the month after the original, with the debits and credits swapped.
In QuickBooks Desktop Premier and Enterprise, the Reverse button sits along the top of the Main tab in the Make General Journal Entries window, and it posts the flipped transaction into the following accounting month. That default date is the point of the feature: it is built for accruals you book at period end and unwind at the start of the next period. If you are correcting a mistake rather than unwinding an accrual, change the reversal date to match the original, or the correction will land in the wrong month and both months will be wrong.
An adjusting journal entry is a normal journal entry that has been flagged as an adjustment, usually by an accountant closing a period. In QuickBooks Online Accountant the flag matters: entries marked as adjusting are collected on the adjusting journal entries report and shown alongside the adjusted trial balance, so a reviewer can see in one place every change made after the books were handed over. Depreciation, accrued payroll, prepaid expense amortization and inventory or tax true ups are the usual candidates.
Without an accountant login you can still post the same entries, you just do not get the separate report. In that case lean on the memo field and a consistent naming habit, and check the audit log if you need to reconstruct who changed what.
Sometimes, and it depends on your subscription. QuickBooks Online exposes bulk import under Settings > Import Data, and a Journal Entries tile appears there for some accounts and not others. Published guidance conflicts on the US version specifically: several sources describe the native journal entry import as standard in the UK and Canadian editions but restricted in the US to higher tiers such as Advanced or to an accountant login. Rather than trust a secondhand answer, open Settings > Import Data in your own company file and see whether the tile is there. If it is not, third party importers fill the gap, and QuickBooks Online Advanced has been adding spreadsheet sync features that cover bulk entry creation.
Before you build the import file, though, check what you are actually importing. If the rows are bank or credit card transactions, importing them as journal entries is the expensive path: you get a ledger full of entries that will never match the bank feed. Convert the statements to .qbo and upload them through the banking screen, and the same data arrives in a form QuickBooks can categorize, match and reconcile.
Three routes, covered in full in our guide to viewing journal entries in QuickBooks Online. The Journal report under Reports lists every entry in date order and is the fastest way to see all of them at once. The audit log filters by transaction type and shows who created or edited an entry. And any account register reached from the chart of accounts shows the entries that touched that specific account, which is usually what you want when a balance looks wrong and you are trying to work out why.
A payroll journal entry is the standard way to bring an outside payroll provider's numbers into QuickBooks when the provider does not sync automatically. The shape is always the same. Debit gross wages and debit the employer share of payroll taxes, because both are your expense. Credit your bank account for the net amount that actually left it. Credit a payroll liability account for every amount withheld from employees and every employer tax you owe but have not yet remitted.
Those liability credits are the part worth watching. They should clear to zero when you actually pay the tax agency, and a payroll liability account that only grows is the usual sign that the payments are being coded to an expense account instead of against the liability. Use the payroll provider's own period report as the source, one entry per pay run, and the account will reconcile.
Then a journal entry is not what you need, and no amount of careful debiting will make it behave like one. Every month a bank or credit card account is missing from QuickBooks, you have a choice: hand key a summary entry that closes the balance and breaks the reconciliation, or get the actual transactions in. Our converter reads the PDF or scanned statement, extracts each transaction with its date, description and amount, and writes a .qbo file you upload through the same banking screen a live bank feed uses. The transactions arrive as real bank transactions, so bank rules categorize them, the matching engine sees them, and the reconciliation works the way it is supposed to. QuickBooks Online can read a PDF or image statement itself now, with AI extraction, but only in English and only under 350 KB, which rules out most scans and nearly every multi month file.
Upload a PDF, see every transaction extracted in seconds. No card to try it.
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For the accounts behind your entries, see the chart of accounts in QuickBooks Online, and to get statement data in properly start with importing a bank statement into QuickBooks Online or reconciling bank statements in QuickBooks. Related reading: the QuickBooks trial balance, closing the month in QuickBooks, opening balance equity and reclassifying transactions.
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