OOB Bill Pay Check
An Out-of-Balance Bill Payment Check, the Stub does not equal the face amount of the check.You have just sat down for your first cup of coffee at the office when a vendor calls to tell you that you underpaid their invoice by 42-cents. (Yes, that is what I said, 42-cents.) The vendor reports that they got the check in the amount of $4,692.71 but the stub shows the payment is for $4,693.13 which was the correct amount of their invoice. Your vendor wants to know what happened to their 42-cents.
You open the actual check and sure enough the amount on the face of the check is 42-cents less than the amount in the stub. you then run the transaction journal and notice that the ‘debits’ and ‘credits’ are not equal. Knowing that Debits and Credits must always be equal for every accounting transaction, you begin to wonder how QuickBooks could have saved an out-of-balance vendor bill payment check.
As it turns out, this type of error sometimes occurs when a transaction is saved automatically during an unexpected close of QuickBooks. If QuickBooks improperly shuts down, or the connection between QuickBooks on your desktop and the QuickBooks Database Server is lost, a transaction can be saved by the Database Server without the confirming balance computation being finalized.
Many times a transaction such as this will cause your Balance Sheet to be out of balance, but in this case with the ‘transaction difference’ only involving a few cents, you might not even notice the out-of-balance situation. This would especially be so if you are dealing with extremely large balances and you have chosen to not even display cents on Summary Reports such as the Balance Sheet.
In the case of this example, it kind of makes you wonder why a Vendor would even have concerned themselves with only 42-cents on a four-thousand-some-odd dollar transaction, but I guess their A/R staff didn’t’ want to be ‘out of balance’ either. Obviously this 42-cent error probably doesn’t warrant having a ProAdvisor (or the “Data Detective’) come out to your office at $100’s per hour to figure out why you are out-of-balance, if this is the only problem that can be identified. (This error should also show up in the QBWin.log after you run the Verify utility, perhaps as a part of a scheduled Back-up.)
The good news is that this type of error is easily resolved by forcing a re-calculation of the correct amount. In this example the stub was correct and the amount on the check face was in error, but many times the reverse will be true. You should save the recalculated transaction, and then run the Verify Data utility. If the same transaction remains ‘in error’ on the QBWin.log file if the Verify fails, it will be necessary to confirm that your correction ‘saved’, and then run the Rebuild Data utility. Remember to ‘always’ make a back-up of your data before manually correcting any form of data corruption, or before performing a Rebuild of your data.
Now you know that you too can easily track-down the villainous 42-cent error and repair it, after all the solution is “elementary my Dear Watson.”