QuickBooks Reclassify Transactions

Who has it and where to find it

Intuit lists the tool in QuickBooks Online Advanced and Intuit Accountant Suite, and also in Intuit Enterprise Suite. The detail that matters for smaller businesses is the accountant route: QuickBooks Online Accountant can use it for clients on any subscription. A business on a lower plan that needs a bulk cleanup can have its accountant run it from their side.

Intuit’s current path is Settings, then Dimensions, then Dimension assignment, then Reclassify transactions. An older Intuit article gives the shorter path of Settings, then Reclassify Transactions, so if you don’t see Dimensions, look for Reclassify Transactions directly under Settings.

The first choice on the screen is the Account type. Profit and Loss shows income and expense accounts. Balance Sheet shows asset, liability and equity accounts. Then pick the account the transactions are in now, set a date range, and search or filter to the ones you want.

What it can’t reclassify

Intuit lists five limits, and each one decides whether the tool can help with a given mess.

Transactions with items. "For invoices, sales receipts, checks, or bills that include products or services, you can only change the class, not the account." The account on those lines comes from the product or service, so the tool leaves it alone.

Payment accounts. "You cannot change the bank or credit card account for expenses." The expense side of an expense can move. The account it was paid from cannot.

Billable expenses. You can change the expense account but not the income account on the related income transaction.

Inventory adjustments. Neither account nor class can change, because they are tied to inventory shrinkage and asset accounts.

Payroll. Payroll transactions are managed in the Payroll app, not here.

One rule applies to moves rather than exclusions: when a transaction is moved to Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable, Intuit says "you must assign a customer or vendor."

What it fixes in a Stripe-synced file

Three kinds of Stripe cleanup fit the tool well.

Fees on the wrong expense account. If Stripe processing fees were recorded as expenses against a general account such as Bank Charges, and you want them on a dedicated Stripe fees account, the expense account is exactly what the tool can move. Filter the Profit and Loss account list to the old account, narrow by date, and move the batch.

Adding classes after the fact. If you switch on class tracking partway through the year, past Stripe sales receipts and invoices have no class. Because the tool can change the class on transactions with items, it can tag months of sales with the right class in one pass. The same goes for locations.

Balance sheet mistakes. A run of transactions posted to the wrong asset or liability account can be moved by choosing Balance Sheet as the account type, subject to the payment-account and item rules above.

What it can’t fix, and what to do instead

Two common Stripe problems fall outside the tool.

Sales income on the wrong account. Stripe sales usually reach QuickBooks as sales receipts or invoices with a product or service on each line, and the income account comes from that product. The tool can’t change the account on those lines. The fix is on the transactions themselves: change the product on the affected lines to one linked to the right income account, one transaction at a time. If the product itself points to the wrong income account, correct that too, so new sales stop landing in the wrong place. Count the affected transactions before you start, because this is the slow path.

Expenses paid from the wrong account. If fees were recorded as paid from the wrong bank or clearing account, the tool can’t change the payment account. Those transactions need editing individually, or reversing and re-entering against the right account.

Before any bulk change, run the report you are trying to fix, such as the Profit and Loss by month or the General Ledger for the account, and save it. Run it again afterwards. The totals should move by exactly the amount you reclassified, and nothing else should change.