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QuickBooks - Reconciling Payments and Deposits Without Fees

In August 2024, deposit syncing was added to our QuickBooks integration, making the information below partially obsolete. The information below is still useful if you do not turn on deposit syncing (ie. you will still need to account for payment and fees manually) but we recommend that you use deposit syncing to create to-the-penny deposits in QuickBooks.

There is a known problem with using QuickBooks where payments are deposited to your bank account in a deposit that has the fees already removed.  This occurs if your credit card processor does "net deposit" (as opposed to gross deposit) or if you're getting payouts from Vrbo or Airbnb. This is a known problem and something we are working to fix by adding in fee and deposit records to OwnerRez so that the differences push across.

In the meantime, for any of these "net deposit" payments, you have to figure those out by hand and then create a "Bank Deposit" record in QuickBooks with the fee difference subtracted.

So for instance, if you have 3 payments in OwnerRez like so:

$ 500.00 - Payment 1
$ 300.00 - Payment 2
$  75.00 - Payment 3
$ 875.00 - Total

But the actual deposit to your bank account is $800 because the processor (or channel) removed $75 in fees.  So your payment records in QuickBooks, pushed over by OwnerRez, equal to $875 but your actual deposit is $800.  Now what?

Manually create a "Bank Deposit" in QuickBooks, select the 3 payments above, then make an inline adjustment on the deposit for $-75 (negative 75) and categorize it against expense account "Bank Service Charges". That will make the deposit sum up to $800 even and match what was deposited.  You can then select the bank transaction that was imported (if you have that turned on) and match it up.

When we get a booking and payment in OwnerRez, we sync that over to QuickBooks Online using the same dates and settings as the booking and payment in OwnerRez.  The booking turns into an invoice in QuickBooks Online, and the payment turns into a "received payment" in QuickBooks Online.  The payment date matches when the guest paid it, regardless of when you can actually get a deposit.  This is because from an accounting standpoint, the invoice (ie. booking) was actually paid on that date.

A deposit and payment aren't the same thing.  Whether it's Airbnb or your credit card processor sending you payouts, there is always a delay between "when the guest paid" and "when money was deposit to you" and also a difference of payout amounts since Airbnb/credit card processors all take fees.

That being said, you don't need to have QuickBooks Online allocate the money directly to your bank account. OwnerRez recommends allocating payments to "Undeposited Funds" which is the general holding account that QuickBooks Online uses for payments that come in but aren't deposited yet (ie. moved to a bank account). Then, in QuickBooks Online, you can create "bank deposit" records that are the sum of multiple payments/refunds and can have fees removed as well.  This should make your accounting match more much accurately and cover all bases.

OwnerRez QB Deposit Settings

Please Note: For this to work, you'll want to make sure your QuickBooks settings are set to deposit to the "Undeposited Funds" bank account and not your actual bank account. This will make sure that payments are not auto-deposited to an account but are shown as available to be selected when creating the manual deposit outlined above.