Is QuickBooks billing a card you still have?

A carpet cleaning owner lost his debit card and ordered a new one. Normal. Nobody thought about what else was paid with that card.

QuickBooks was. The February payment failed, QuickBooks shut the file off, and nobody noticed until I logged in the morning of our April review.

Turning it back on was the easy part. When the subscription came back, QuickBooks pulled in every bank transaction since February a second time. Only the expenses. None of the deposits.

So the file showed two months of costs twice and two months of income once. The profit and loss said the business was losing money it was not losing. Left alone, those duplicates would have gone into the tax return as expenses that never happened. Someone finds that later, and the return gets amended.

I deleted more than 100 transactions one at a time before our 1pm call. Each one is three clicks and a confirmation. It took the morning.

The same new card caused a second problem. A month later he found out his health insurance had not been paid for four months, for the same reason. He paid all four at once.

None of this is a bookkeeping mistake. It is a card mistake that shows up in the books.

What to do before year end:

1. Pull one card statement and list every company that charges it automatically. Software, insurance, phones, fuel, the truck payment.
2. Keep that list. When a card is lost, replaced, or renumbered, update every company on it the same day.
3. Open QuickBooks yourself once a month, even if you never touch anything. If it won’t open, you will know before your bookkeeper does.
4. If the bank feed ever reconnects after a gap, look for doubles before anyone closes the month.

One lost card cost a morning of cleanup and four months of insurance in one payment.

In QuickBooks Online, click the gear icon, then Subscriptions and billing. Look at the card on file and the date of the last payment. If that card is lost, expired, or one you no longer carry, change it today.

If your QuickBooks has a gap like this, start the 5-minute intake.