In this article, we’ll discuss the different reasons why duplicate transactions are created in your QuickBooks Online account and the best practices to help prevent duplicate transactions from happening.

If you have an active bank feed with your QuickBooks Online account and are also simultaneously exporting credit card expenses from Expense Management, there is a possibility for duplicate transactions to be created in QuickBooks Online. Here are some of the reasons this happens:

Bank feed transactions are categorized before the transactions from Expense Management are imported to QuickBooks Online.

If you have rules set up in QuickBooks Online to auto-categorize transactions based on vendors or amounts then QuickBooks Online will fail to detect the transaction flowing from Expense Management as a match and this will lead to a duplicate transaction being created.

The same issue could occur even if you do not have rules in QuickBooks Online to categorize transactions automatically but are manually categorizing a bank feed transaction before the same transaction from Expense Management is imported to QuickBooks Online.

If the credit card expenses (categorized) from Expense Management are getting imported to QuickBooks Online before the transactions from the bank feed can hit QuickBooks Online, the system will fail to detect a match between both transactions thus causing duplicates.

Now, let’s go over some best practices we recommend to prevent any duplicate transactions from getting created in QuickBooks Online.

Turn off any existing rules set up in QuickBooks Online to auto-categorize the bank feed’s transactions and also refrain from manually categorizing the bank feed’s transactions.

To turn off, or disable, rules present in QuickBooks Online do the the following:

Ensure that the transactions from the bank feed are imported to QuickBooks Online before exporting the transactions from Expense Management.

QuickBooks Online suggests a match between two transactions based on the amount, spend date and vendor details. Prevent editing credit card expenses on Expense Management. Ensure that the expense details in Expense Management are consistent with the actual transaction so that QuickBooks Online can detect a match.

Refer to this article to learn how to match corporate credit card expenses exported from Expense Management with the bank feed in QuickBooks Online.

If you have more questions, contact our support team at support@capitalone-fylehq.com.