You can review your bookkeeper's work yourself in six checks
Six checks, each naming the report to open and the figure it should equal. Two of them appear nowhere else: the audit log read for changes made after a reconciliation, and payroll deposits confirmed at the source.
QuickBooks Online's audit log records the date of every change, who made it and the original transaction details, keeps those events for two years and cannot be turned off, which makes a reconciled transaction altered after the fact something an owner can check without asking anyone.
A reconciliation whose beginning balance does not match last month's ending balance means a transaction inside a month you already accepted was edited, deleted, voided, moved or unreconciled afterwards.
The IRS recommends that employers register on EFTPS themselves to verify that payroll tax deposits were made on their behalf, which is the only check on a bookkeeper's work that reads a record held outside the accounting file.
Six checks, one login, about an hour. How to review your bookkeeper's work turns out to be a procedure rather than a conversation about somebody's process, and every step of it produces a yes or a no. You open a named report, you compare one figure to another figure, and you write down what you found.
You are paying someone precisely so that you do not have to know any of this. So none of the six asks you to read a balance sheet or to know what an accrual is. What they ask is that you can open a report and compare two numbers, which is a different skill and one you already have.
If you have not settled what should be arriving each month in the first place, the standard for what a bookkeeper produces monthly is the page to start on. This one assumes the reports exist and asks whether they hold up.
Which six checks can I run on my own books?
These six, in this order, because each one narrows what the next one has to look at. The left column is the check. The right column is the one that matters most on a first run: what a difference usually turns out to be, which is what turns a worry into a specific question.
The check | The report to open | What the number should equal | What a difference usually turns out to be |
|---|---|---|---|
1. Every account reconciled, three months back | Reconciliation Reports, one per account per month | The difference: zero | An account nobody is reconciling at all, most often a second card or a savings account added later |
2. Each month starts where the last one ended | The same two reports side by side: this month's beginning balance, last month's ending balance | Equal, to the cent | A transaction inside a month you already accepted was edited, deleted, voided, moved or unreconciled afterwards |
3. Nothing changed behind you | The audit log, filtered to the period since the last completed reconciliation | No changes to transactions dated inside a month already reconciled | A correction somebody made properly and never mentioned, which is a conversation rather than a problem |
4. Nothing parked in a holding account | Balance sheet and profit and loss, last day of the month: Uncategorized Income, Uncategorized Asset, Uncategorized Expense, Ask My Accountant, Suspense | Zero on each | Transactions nobody could code because nobody asked you what they were |
5. Three lines tie to a document | Balance sheet, plus the reconciliation report, the open invoice report and the depreciation schedule | Cash: the book balance, bridged to the statement by the reconciliation report. Receivables: the total of invoices genuinely unpaid. Fixed assets: what the depreciation schedule says you own | A customer payment recorded as fresh income instead of applied to the invoice, so the invoice never closes |
6. The payroll deposits reached the IRS | EFTPS, under your own enrollment. Not a report in your books | Every federal deposit showing as made, on the dates your payroll run says | The deposits were made and you simply had no way to see it, which is the usual answer and the reason to have the access |
Run them on one bank account first. If checks one to five come back clean on your main checking account for three months, the odds that the rest of the file is a mess are low, and you have spent 20 minutes rather than an hour.
Is there a reconciliation report for every account, every month?
Open Reports, search for Reconciliation Reports, and pick each account in turn. What you are looking for first is not a number. It is whether a report exists for June, July and August at all, for every bank account, every credit card, and the line of credit everyone forgets.
Reconciliation is matching every line on your bank statement to a line in your books, and the report is what the exercise leaves behind. Intuit's QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, states that if everything is in place the difference between the ending balances should be zero. In Xero the equivalent is the Bank Reconciliation Summary report, and Xero's documentation, read in September 2026, states that when your transactions and reconciliation are up to date on the report date, the balance in Xero, the calculated statement balance and the balance in your online banking for that day should all be the same.
A missing report is a bigger finding than a difference of $4.12. The difference is an error somebody will fix in ten minutes. The missing report means an account has been sitting outside the process, and the balance on it has never been compared to anything.
Does this month's reconciliation start where last month's ended?
Put two months of reconciliation reports next to each other and compare one figure: this month's beginning balance against last month's ending balance. They should be identical. When they are not, something inside a period you already accepted has moved since you accepted it.
This is the most useful check on the list that takes no judgment at all, and it is worth knowing what causes it. Intuit's QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, states that a beginning balance discrepancy happens when something changes on a transaction since a past reconciliation, and names the common causes: an incorrect opening balance entered when the account was first created, or a reconciled transaction that was edited, deleted, voided, moved or unreconciled. The same documentation says the discrepancy report lists what changed, how it affected the balance, and what to do about each item.
So the figure does two jobs. It tells you a past month moved, and the report behind it tells you which transaction moved and by how much, before you ask anyone anything.
Has anything changed inside a month I already accepted?
Open the audit log. Of the six this is the check with the most leverage, and it is the one that needs nobody's cooperation: the record is already there, it is kept for you, and it cannot be switched off.
Intuit's QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, states that the audit log displays the date of the change, the user who made it and any original transaction details, that events recorded in it are available for two years, and that for audit and security reasons you cannot turn it off. Xero keeps the same kind of record in its history and notes: Xero's documentation, read in September 2026, states that each time you create, edit or make any other change to a transaction, an entry is added to that transaction's history, recording the name of the user who did it and the time and date.
The audit log is the only report in your books that records what was done to them, rather than what the business did.
Four steps, and the filtering is what turns two years of entries into a five-minute read:
Go to Settings, then Audit log.
Filter to the account you are checking and to the period since your last completed reconciliation.
Look for changes to transactions dated inside a month that has already been reconciled. A transaction entered last week and dated last week is ordinary work. A transaction dated in March and edited in September is the thing you are looking for.
Open the transaction itself and select Audit history. Intuit's documentation, read in September 2026, states that the audit history shows who made the changes, when they were made and what the changes are, with a side-by-side comparison view.
Here is the shape of a typical finding, as an illustration rather than a case. Say a $4,000 equipment purchase was coded to repairs in March, and an accountant moved it to fixed assets in September while preparing the return. March is now a different month than the one you looked at. That is correct bookkeeping. It is also a change to a period you thought was finished, and the reason to ask is not suspicion, it is that you want to know when your own numbers move.
Most entries in an audit log are somebody doing their job. The check is not there to catch anyone. It is there so that whether anything has changed since you last looked stops being a question you have to take on trust.
Open Reconciliation Reports for your main checking account and pull the last three months. Look at two figures on each: the difference, which should be zero, and the beginning balance, which should match the previous month's ending balance. Six numbers, five minutes, and you will know more about the state of your books than any conversation would have told you.
Which accounts should be empty on the last day of the month?
The holding accounts, all of them, and the test is a balance rather than a count. Open the balance sheet and the profit and loss for the last day of last month and look for Uncategorized Income, Uncategorized Asset, Uncategorized Expense, Ask My Accountant and Suspense. Any balance sitting in one of them is a transaction nobody could identify, which usually means nobody asked you what it was.
These accounts are not a sign of anything going wrong. They are how the software behaves when it cannot decide. Intuit's QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, describes Uncategorized Asset as an account that records any asset that cannot be matched to an account, and lists it among the default accounts that cannot be deleted. It exists so that the bank feed always has somewhere to put something. The finding is not that the account exists, it is that a balance is still sitting in it on the last day of a month somebody has called finished.
There is a reason to care beyond tidiness. IRS Publication 583, revised December 2024, states that your books must show your gross income as well as your deductions and credits, and that your supporting documents should show the amounts and sources of your gross receipts. A $6,200 balance in Uncategorized Income is a receipt whose source your books do not show. The fix is usually one email answering what four transfers were, and it takes longer to worry about than to resolve.
While you have the balance sheet open, look for a balance that cannot be true. A negative bank account that you know was never overdrawn. A negative liability, which says you have paid a debt more than in full. A payroll liability account with a balance from a quarter that is long since filed. Each of those is one question, and each question has an ordinary answer somewhere behind it.
Which three lines do I tie to something outside the books?
Cash, receivables and fixed assets, because those three are the lines where an outside document exists and can be produced in a minute. The wider method is reading a balance sheet line by line against the documents behind it, and this is the short version of it aimed at work somebody else did.
Get the direction of the cash line right, because it is the thing most often stated backwards. The cash on your balance sheet is the book balance, and it should not equal the balance on your bank statement. Checks written and not yet presented sit between them, as do deposits made on the 31st that clear on the 2nd. The reconciliation report is the bridge: it starts from one and arrives at the other, and it lists what is in between. If somebody tells you the balance sheet should match the bank, the reconciliation report is the document that shows why it usually does not.
Receivables is the quickest of the three. The accounts receivable figure on the balance sheet should equal the total of customer invoices genuinely unpaid on that date. When it is higher, the usual cause is a payment recorded as fresh income rather than applied to the invoice it paid, which leaves the invoice open forever and overstates both income and receivables. Fixed assets should agree with the depreciation schedule your preparer works from, which is the document that says what the business owns and what has already been written off.
One finding recurs more than any other when an owner runs this for the first time, and it is worth naming: money the owner took out of the business, sitting in the expense column. A draw is not an expense and it does not belong on the profit and loss at all. Where that money actually lands in the equity section is the correct treatment, and if your profit looks lower than the year felt, this is the first place to look.
Which check happens outside the accounting file?
The payroll one, and that is exactly what makes it the strongest of the six. Every other check reads a document produced by the same system you are checking. This one reads a record held by the IRS.
The responsibility for federal employment tax deposits stays with the employer however the work is delegated, which is the hub's subject and is covered in what does not transfer when somebody else keeps your books. What matters here is the verification step the IRS itself recommends. The IRS says employers should ensure their payroll providers are using EFTPS so that employers can confirm that payments are being made on their behalf, and that employers should register on the EFTPS system to get their own PIN and use it to periodically verify payments. It also states that when an employer registers on EFTPS, they have online access to their payment history for 16 months.
There is a second route in, and it is the one most owners already have without knowing. The IRS's guidance on monitoring outsourced payroll duties on EFTPS states that when a third party enrolls you in EFTPS to make federal tax deposits on your behalf, you may receive an Inquiry PIN, which you should activate immediately and use to monitor EFTPS payments and confirm the third party is making the required deposits. If a letter with a PIN in it arrived when you set up payroll and went into a drawer, that is the drawer.
Payroll itself runs through your payroll provider, and none of this suggests taking it back. What reaches your books is the journal entry the payroll run produces, and that entry is one of the things that has to reconcile. The deposit is a separate event with a separate record, and the point of the enrollment is that you can see it without asking.
What to do if a deposit was genuinely missed is a conversation with whoever files your payroll returns, and it is worth having quickly rather than carefully. What this check does is tell you whether there is anything to have it about.
When am I done, and what do I say about what I found?
You are done when all six checks have been run and each one is either clean or carries a written question with a figure attached to it. That is the whole done state. Not that the books look fine, which is not a finding, and not that something feels off, which nobody can act on.
Write each question the way you would write it to a supplier about an invoice. Four moves, and none of them is an accusation:
Name the document and the date. The July reconciliation report for the operating account.
State the figure and what it was compared to. Its beginning balance is $2,180 higher than June's ending balance.
Ask what happened, not who did it. Can you tell me what changed in June?
Say what you want next time. Could the reconciliation reports come through with the monthly pack from now on?
Most of what these checks turn up has a boring explanation, and the explanation usually arrives the same day. A bank statement that came late. A correction made in the right way at the right time. A transaction nobody could code because the only person who knew what it was had not been asked. Getting a straight answer to a specific question is itself the thing you were trying to find out.
If the answers do not come, or the same finding survives two months of asking, that is a different question from this one. Whether to move your books to somebody else has its own criteria and its own timing in the year, and it is not a decision to make from one uncleared difference. What these six checks give you is the evidence to make it on, or the evidence that you do not need to.
And if it turns out nobody has been doing the monthly coding and reconciling at all, that is work somebody has to do every month whoever ends up doing it, with what it costs moving with your transaction volume and how far behind the file already is. Run the checks first. It is a much shorter conversation when you arrive with six answers instead of a feeling.
How do I fix a reconciliation discrepancy in QuickBooks?
Start from the figure the software is showing you at the end of the reconciliation, because the difference names its own cause more often than not. Intuit's QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, says that if everything is in place the difference between the ending balances should be zero, and names the usual causes of one that is not: an incorrect ending balance entered at the start, and transactions entered into QuickBooks that have not cleared the bank yet. A difference that exactly equals one transaction on your statement is a missing entry. A difference that is exactly twice a transaction is usually one entered twice with opposite signs, or one matched to the wrong side.
How do I fix a beginning balance issue when reconciling?
A beginning balance that does not match last month's ending balance means something on a transaction changed after a past reconciliation, so the fix starts with finding what changed rather than with adjusting the balance. Intuit's QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, names the common causes: an incorrect opening balance entered when the account was created, or a reconciled transaction that was edited, deleted, voided, moved or unreconciled. Its route through is the discrepancy report, which lists what changed and how it affected the balance. Where that report is clean and the balance is still off, the same documentation sends you to the audit log, filtered to the account and the period since the last completed reconciliation, and to the account register filtered by reconcile status, looking for a transaction marked R dated after the last completed reconciliation. An adjusting entry that forces the reconciliation to close does not fix any of that. It hides the cause, and the same difference comes back next month wearing a different number.
How do I find deleted transactions in the audit log?
Filter the audit log and search the page for the word deleted. Intuit's QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, states that once a transaction is deleted in QuickBooks Online it cannot be restored, but that the audit log holds the details so you can re-enter it: choose the user, date and event filters, find the deleted entry, select View in the History column, and recreate the transaction with its original date from what the log shows. The same documentation states that events recorded in the audit log are available for two years, so a deletion from four years ago is not recoverable this way.
What does a balance in Uncategorized Income or Ask My Accountant mean on my books?
It means a transaction reached your books that nobody could identify, and it is waiting on an answer rather than on work. Uncategorized Income, Uncategorized Expense and Uncategorized Asset are accounts QuickBooks Online creates by default, and Intuit's documentation, read in September 2026, describes Uncategorized Asset as the account that records any asset that cannot be matched to an account. Ask My Accountant is the same idea run by a person: a holding place for transactions somebody has flagged for a decision. A balance in any of them on the last day of a closed month is normal for a week and a question after a month, and the answer is almost always a list of transactions somebody needs you to explain.
How can I confirm my payroll tax deposits were actually made?
Register on EFTPS yourself and look. The IRS states that employers should ensure their payroll providers are using EFTPS so that employers can confirm payments are being made on their behalf, and that employers should register on the EFTPS system to get their own PIN and use that PIN to periodically verify payments. Registration gives an employer online access to their payment history for 16 months. Where a third party enrolled you, the IRS says you may receive an Inquiry PIN and should activate it immediately to monitor payments and confirm the deposits are being made. This is the only check on this page that does not read a document produced by the same system you are checking, which is what makes it worth the one setup it takes.
Six answers instead of a feeling
You have run the six checks and you have either six clean results or a list of specific questions with figures attached. If what you want next is a second read on what you found, bring the six figures to a call and we will go through them with you. Bookist is AI automation for the monthly bookkeeping with an accountant reviewing it before it reaches you, so a reconciliation that will not close is a conversation we can have.
This article explains how the checks work and what to ask about what they turn up. It is not tax advice for your situation.
Operations background across retail, property management, and e-commerce. Writes step-by-step guides for owners who need the answer, not the theory.
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