How to remove a bank account in QuickBooks

Be clear about what you want to happen to the account. If you simply want it to stop appearing on the Bank transactions screen, disconnecting is enough, and the account itself stays active under Accounting. If you want to retire it more permanently, the option is to make it inactive in the chart of accounts. Intuit says to speak to your accountant before taking that step, so that your financial records stay accurate, and it keeps the instructions for it in a separate article on making an account inactive.

Intuit's one prerequisite for disconnecting is being on the Bank transactions tab, because the steps start from the account's tile there.

If the account is a parent with subaccounts, or a subaccount of one, check how your bank delivers downloaded transactions before you change any connection. When everything downloads into one account, Intuit's rule is to connect only the parent. When transactions download to the individual accounts, connect the subaccounts and leave the parent unconnected. QuickBooks won't let both be connected, and trying gives a message that the account is already connected.

1. Go to All apps, select Accounting, then select Bank transactions.
2. Select the tile for the bank account you want to remove.
3. Select the pencil icon at the top right of the account.
4. Select Edit Account Info.
5. Scroll to the bottom and tick the Disconnect this Account on Save box.
6. Select Save and Close.

The account drops out of the Bank transactions screen view, but it remains active in the Accounting tab. To take it further and make it inactive, speak to your accountant first, then follow Intuit's article on inactive accounts.

Without a bank connection you can still record activity on the account. Intuit's subaccount article says that where a bank offers no online services, or you choose not to connect, you can create cheques and deposits for the account as usual or add transactions to the bank register by hand.

For a parent with subaccounts, Intuit says you only need to reconcile the parent, because the subaccounts' transactions roll up into it. Reports follow the same pattern: run one for a subaccount to see its own transactions, or at the parent level to see the parent and every subaccount together. In the Chart of Accounts, parent accounts sit to the left of the table, with each subaccount indented beneath its parent.

Seeing a message that the account is already connected? You're probably trying to connect a parent account and one of its subaccounts at once. QuickBooks allows one or the other, so connect the level your bank downloads transactions to.

Two other quirks come from how banks send subaccount data. When subaccounts are first connected, the same opening balance transaction may download to each of them, and you need to delete all but one of those when you reconcile. Some banks also show the overall account balance against every subaccount, because the bank supplies one fixed balance for the whole account rather than a balance for each subaccount.