How to Delete Your Quickbooks Account

If you own a small or medium-sized business, you probably know that QuickBooks can make your life much easier. It’s fantastic accounting software with a lot of useful features.

With QuickBooks, you can manage your customer, job, and vendor accounts. That also means that you can delete them if you want.

But there are some caveats to that. In this article, we’ll explain which QuickBooks accounts you can delete and how. And when is the right time to go through with it? Also, we’ll go over several other things you should consider.

QuickBooks Account You Can’t Delete

QuickBooks lets you delete your accounts, but it also encourages you to contact a professional accountant before you do.

However, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind if you intend to go through with the deletion. You can’t delete all of your QuickBooks accounts.

QuickBooks created them automatically, and you can’t alter them. These include sales tax account, undeposited funds, retained earnings, inventory, reconcile discrepancies, and opening balance equity.

Some types of accounts might require a few extra steps before you can remove them. For example, if your income account contains pending charges, you have to send invoices to your customers before you delete it.

Deleting a QuickBooks Account

Even if the account you want to delete is not a default account, there is still one prerequisite before you remove it. It has to have a $0 balance in it. If that’s the case, you can follow these steps:

1. Open the QuickBooks web portal and go to “Settings.”
2. Select “Chart of Accounts” and search for the account you want to remove.
3. Select the drop-down menu button and select “Delete.”
4. Confirm your selection by clicking “Yes.”

That’s it, and the account is gone. Once you do this, there is no turning back. So, make sure that you don’t need the account in question anymore. If you’re not sure, there is another option to consider.

Make a QuickBooks Account Inactive

There are situations when deleting a QuickBooks account is the best thing to do. But in most cases, opting to make it inactive is a better option. And even though it also comes with specific warnings, it’s a reversible process. Making a QuickBooks account inactive is essentially the same deleting it.

It will disappear from the Chart of Accounts unless you choose to list the inactive accounts as well. The process of making an account inactive is the same as deleting it. Only instead of clicking “Delete” you go with “Make Inactive.”

And if you want to activate it again, follow the same steps and select “Make active” in the third step. But when your account becomes active again, QuickBooks won’t reverse the previous balance and settings. You’ll have to do that manually.

Deleting QuickBooks Online Data

If you want to start from scratch with QuickBooks, you can purge all the online data. If you wish to do so, your account can’t be older than 60 days.

And also, this is only possible if you’re QuickBooks Plus and Essentials subscriber. After you go through this process, the QuickBooks system will permanently delete all the data you’ve entered up until that point, and there’ll be no way to get it back. If you’re sure you want to do that, follow these steps:

1. Go to your QuickBooks account.
2. Include /purgecompany into the account URL.
3. You will see the list of the things that will get deleted.
4. Enter the word “Yes” and then select “Ok.”
5. Select “Wipe Data.”
6. When the process is over, you will be redirected to the QuickBooks Home page.

If this doesn’t work, your next option is to cancel your QuickBooks subscription and start a new one. To do that, go to “Settings” (gear icon) and then “Your Account” and cancel the subscription.

Organize QuickBooks the Way It Suits You

There’s a reason why QuickBooks makes deleting an account a little harder than expected. If it were too easy to remove one, their customer service would be flooded with inquiries on how to restore them.

That’s why making the account you no longer use inactive is a better choice. You don’t have to see it unless you want to, and if you change your mind, you can always reactivate it. And if you decide to start from the ground up, you know how to purge your account.

Have you ever deleted a QuickBooks account? Have you deactivated one? What about data purges? Let us know in the comments section below.