How to Know If Your QuickBooks Is Correct: 7 Checks You Can Run Today

If you’ve ever looked at your QuickBooks file and felt a twinge of uncertainty, you’re not alone. QuickBooks makes bookkeeping accessible, but it doesn’t guarantee accuracy. The good news is you can validate the health of your file without being an accountant. This guide walks you through seven practical checks you can complete in under an hour to confirm that what you see in QuickBooks actually reflects reality. Run them monthly and you’ll prevent the small errors that snowball into tax‑season chaos.

Start with the bank reconciliation status. In QuickBooks, each bank and credit card account should be reconciled to the latest statement. Click into the account register and confirm the most recent reconciliation date and ending balance match your statement. If you see multiple months unreconciled, or if the reconciliation difference isn’t zero, don’t push forward — stop and fix it. Reconciliation is the anchor that ties your books to the bank; without it, every report is suspect.

Next, scan the uncategorized buckets. Search your Profit & Loss for “Uncategorized Income” and “Uncategorized Expense.” These are catch‑all categories QuickBooks uses when a transaction isn’t assigned properly. The presence of balances here is a red flag. Drill down, reclassify to the correct accounts, and create bank rules so the same mistake doesn’t recur. Your goal is to have those categories at zero every month.

Review owner transactions for misclassification. If you’re a sole proprietor or single‑member LLC, owner draws and personal reimbursements should never appear as business expenses. Filter vendor names like yourself or common personal payees and verify they’re coded to equity (Owner’s Draw/Owner’s Contribution) rather than Meals, Utilities, or Office Supplies. This single cleanup improves your P&L instantly and avoids overstating deductible expenses.

Verify that sales actually tie to deposits. Open your Sales by Customer Detail and compare to your bank deposits for the period. If you use a payment processor, confirm the gross amount, processor fees, and net deposit are accounted for (either via a clearing account or through proper fee categorization). Unmatched deposits may be owner contributions or transfers; misposted sales inflate revenue and create tax exposure.

Look for duplicate or missing transactions by running a Transaction Detail report for the month and sorting by amount then by date. Duplicates often stem from manually entered transactions plus bank feed imports. Missing items are common when the bank feed dropped for a few days. A quick scan catches these before reconciliations become painful and financial statements misleading.

Check for negative balances that shouldn’t be negative. On the Balance Sheet, negative bank accounts, sales tax payable, payroll liabilities, or inventory often indicate posting errors. Click through to identify the entries causing the negative. Often a payment was recorded without the bill, or a transfer was mis‑coded as an expense. Correcting these brings your statements back in line with how the business actually operates.

Finally, run a sanity check on your Chart of Accounts usage. Open the Profit & Loss and toggle to “Percent of Income.” Do the percentages make sense for your industry? If software subscriptions are 18% of income or vehicle expenses jump from 2% to 12% month‑over‑month, that’s a signal to review categorization. Use these patterns to create rules and standard operating procedures so the books get cleaner over time, not messier.

If these checks surface more issues than you have time to fix, you’re normal. The point of a monthly review is to catch problems early, but consistency is hard when you’re running the business. That’s why SimplifiBooks exists: we run a structured 30‑point check each month and send you a plain‑English, two‑page report showing what’s good and what needs attention — so you can stay focused on revenue instead of rabbit holes.